Gathering performance data with sysstat

The sysstat package is included in all distributions but not always installed by default. It's a collection of performance monitoring tools and you can check the options for your current version in the manual pages. It's platform independent and so this works on Linux in general.

After installation of the package there are two different ways to gather data.

Using the command line
Ad hoc data can be gathered by calling the data collector from the command line. For newer versions of sysstat the command

/usr/lib64/sa/sadc -S DISK -F 5 outfile.sa

and for older versions of sysstat the command

/usr/lib64/sa/sadc -d -F 5 outfile.sa

will collect data in 5 second intervals until it's interrupted by ^C. The -F forces a file compatible with the current sysstat version and the -S DISK or -d enables the collection of statistics for the block devices.
You then can convert the created binary file by

sar -A -f outfile.sa > outfile.txt

to get a report to read. There are many options for sar to select what's being shown in the report, please check the man page for them. The -A option shows all the data.

Using cron
For regular monitoring the distributions configure sysstat to be started as a cron job or as a service. The history files are then put under /var/log/sa and converted once a day to text file. In the configuration file /etc/sysstat/sysstat (SUSE) and /etc/sysconfig/sysstat (Red Hat) the archive settings for this history can be configured.

For SLES  you can install the cron settings by

• SLES10: /etc/init.d/sysstat start
• SLES11: /etc/init.d/boot.sysstat start

For RHEL5 and RHEL6 the installation is done automatically. 
At the end there is a file/link to /etc/cron.d/ that you can adapt and e.g. changing the 10 min collection interval or adapting the reports. As usual the documentation for the sa1 and sa2 commands used there are in the respective man pages.