Performance

In a previous post I talked about Taming the cpu metrics, while that post was an overview of cpu metrics I thought it was a good topic to emphasize on the cpu steal metric in linux hosts. This is something I recently found and didn’t know it even existed, but it can be very useful when running in virtualized environments and helping us tune either the vm, or the physical host that runs the vms.

In a past blog post I talked about The misunderstood load average in linux hosts, while load average is a good metric to watch in linux systems to catch generic performance problems, it does not reveal what the issue might be. This time I will dig more into cpu metrics collected from a linux system and explain them, for this purpose I will use multipass vms, and will be showing metrics from grafana screenshots which take the data from prometheus and prometheus node exporter (this is actually out of the scope of this post).

Ever wondered when someone runs the command uptime in a linux host what the values in the load average: section mean? well I have wondered about it many times in my career. And this should be a simple question to ask a seasoned linux administrator or developer, right? well it’s not entirely true, as the load average value in a linux hosts probably is the most misunderstood term and often associated with the wrong concepts.