Introduction To Sysdig – System Exploration Tool

Sysdig is a system exploration tool which can be used for system level monitoring of various machines or EC2 instances. It is an open source tool which captures system state and activity from a running Linux instance. The state is then saved, filtered and analysed to give calculated results. System level troubleshooting is very difficult when it is considered especially in distributed, virtualized, and cloud-based environments. Sysdig is used for system level troubleshooting as it offers various advantages and convenience to the users. Sysdig is used by tens of thousands of developers, operations engineers, and system/network/security administrators around the world.

Advantages of Sysdig

• Flexible -> There are different chisels available in Sysdig. The ever growing chisel collection covers tons of troubleshooting, monitoring and security cases. There are different chisels for different level monitoring . Some examples of chisels in Sysdig are CPU Usage , Errors , I/O , Logs , Misc , Net , Performance , Security , System State.

• Fits to your Workflow -> The Sysdig monitoring fits to your workflow. Either you can perform real time monitoring of your machine or you can do a trace dump and analyze it later.

• Cloud-Friendly -> Sysdig Tool is cloud-friendly as virtual machines get killed or just disppaer. You can store all the monitoring or exploration data in a dump and can analyze it later.

• Fast and Stable -> Sysdig is Fast and Stable as it is built to run in production and minimize crashes.

Usecases of Sysdig

Sysdig is a new, open source system troubleshooting tool that gives you unprecedented visibility into your Linux instance, with a natural and intuitive workflow. In reference to Amazon Web Services, we can use Sysdig to monitor different services such as Elastic Load Balancer(ELB) , Relational Database Service(RDS), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) etc.

Consider a usecase where the cause of increase in CPU utilization is to be find in a wordpress deployment architecture. Sysdig cloud will explain which module is causing it in just few seconds.

It can be easily identified in the above use case that php5-fpm module is the cause of increase in CPU Utilization.

Installation Steps of Sysdig on Linux

To automatically install Sysdig on the Linux system, the following steps have to be performed on the terminal:

[code]# curl -s https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.draios.com/stable/install-sysdig | sudo bash
[/code]

After the Installation, you can invoke Sysdig to confirm that Sysdig is working fine. To stop the continuosly moving terminal, you can press Ctrl+C to stop.

[code]
# sysdig
[/code]

Checking Available Chisels

Chisel basically resembles a tool which is used to dig out. In terms of Sysdig, where the chisel is used to get some particular information about the system, various chisels are available. The following command is used to check different types of chisels in Sysdig:

[code]
# sysdig -cl | less
[/code]

Detailed information about particular chisel

[code]
# sysdig -i [chisel_name]
[/code]

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