System Resource Report

Overview


The system resource report provides information about the use of various important resources used by the whole system over a period of time. It can be used to identify when performance problems may be resulting from a system that lacks the resources for demand placed on it, or to identify times of peak demand.

There are four separate reports, that are generated through system resource report application:

• System Load

• Memory

• SWAP Memory

• Uptime

Installation


The System Resource Report application is not available by default. It can be installed from Marketplace in the left-hand navigation panel.

Navigation to System Resources Report Application Page


The System Resources Report application page can be accessed through Left-hand Navigation Menu:

1. Access the System Resources Report application through left-hand Navigation Menu:

Left-hand Navigation Menu > Reports > System Resource Report

View & Export System Resource Reports


Reports display automatically on the page. Each one of the four reports has an export as PDF option.

System Load


The system load measures how much the CPU is in demand. Technically, it measures the number of processes that are either running or waiting for the CPU, averaged over a short period of time. The report graphs the averages over periods of 1 minute, 5 minute and 15 minute intervals, which helps to analyse the load as CPU load is often ‘spiky’ going high for short periods (and short bursts of high load average are expected and normal, and which should not be considered a problem unless there are issues with responsiveness of specific tasks).

In single CPU devices, a device that spends most of its time with load at or below 1.0 usually indicates that there is adequate CPU power available, sustained loads over 1.0 may indicate the hardware is underpowered (or may indicated some form of bottleneck). CPU is not normalised for the number of CPUs, so higher end devices with multiple CPU cores should have a higher load average, and any sustained value below the number of CPUs indicates CPU power is adequate for demand. ###

Memory


This report is a record of RAM/memory use over a period of time. It is important to understand that the total memory use should normally approach 100%, as the system will attempt to use any spare memory for caching.
Memory is recorded as being in one of four usage states:

  • Free
  • Cached
  • Buffers
  • Kernel and Apps Memory that is free is unused, memory that is cached is used simply for speed improvements. Kernel and Apps is memory used to load the core system, Buffers is memory used by applications to perform their function.

If the Kernel and Apps memory plus the Buffers memory together remain well below the total memory the majority of the time, the level of RAM is adequate. If it sustained at high levels, that can result in significant slowing down of the system, and you should check the Swap Memory report.

Swap Memory


When the amount of memory the system needs is higher than the amount available, the virtual memory system will use hard disk space in place of RAM, using the Swap Memory area of the hardware disk. As hard disk is much slower, generally several hundred times slower, than RAM this can result is a drastic reduction in performance. So checking to see if there is significant use of Swap Memory is useful if your system is experiencing poor performance. A small amount of swap, such as 20%, or a short spike while performing a task that does not require high responsiveness, is not problematic, but if the swap level is 50% or more for a sustained period, the device may not have enough RAM for the demand.

Uptime


The uptime is simply a graph of the amount of time since the device was restarted (either restarted manually or due to a hardware issue such as a loss of power). This allows you to see at a glance if the hardware is usually running reliably. This is equivalent to the Unix uptime command.