Recently I was building a ZenPack for Zenoss. The ZenPack included an Event Command which executed a custom script. I wanted to store the custom script in the ZenPack and I didn’t want to do anything other than have proper script dependencies in place for it to work. (Read More)

Monitoring and analyzing performance is an important task for any sysadmin. Disk I/O bottlenecks can bring applications to a crawl. What are IOPS? Should I use SATA, SAS, or FC? How many spindles do I need? What RAID level should I use? Is my system read or write heavy? These are common questions for anyone embarking on an disk I/O analysis quest. Obligatory disclaimer: I do not consider myself an expert in storage or anything for that mater. This is just how I have done I/O analysis in the past. I welcome additions and corrections. I believe it’s also important to note that this analysis is geared toward random operations than sequential read/write workloads.

A while back I wrote about using Apache as a dynamic reverse proxy. Anyone who has done even minimal research into web servers knows that Apache is the swiss army knife. It trys to be everything for everyone, and like a swiss army knife may not be as good as a more refined too at least as far as efficiency is concerned.Read the full article Transparent dynamic reverse proxy with nginx at -->

System performance analytics seems to be a frequent question on forums and mailing lists. Finding out why something is slow is generally nontrivial as there are many factors to consider. I have found the sysstat package to be an invaluable tool when looking at system performance. Specifically the command sar gives a wealth of information.

Read the full post Analyzing linux system performance and finding bottle necks