Xmodulo shows you how to monitor and troubleshoot a Linux server using sysdig

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you need to track system calls made and received by a process? You'll probably think of strace, and you are right. What tool would you use to monitor raw network traffic from the command line? If you thought about tcpdump, you made an excellent choice again. And if you ever run into the need to having to keep track of open files (in the Unix sense of the word: everything is a file), chances are you'll use lsof.

strace, tcpdump, and lsof are indeed great utilities that should be part of every sysadmin's toolset, and that is precisely the reason why you will love sysdig, a powerful open source tool for system-level exploration and troubleshooting, introduced by its creators as "strace + tcpdump + lsof + awesome sauce with a little Lua cherry on top." Humor aside, one of the great features of sysdig resides in its ability not only to analyze the "live" state of a Linux system, but also to save the state in a dump file for offline inspection. What's more, you can customize sysdig's behavior or even enhance its capabilities by using built-in (or writing your own) small scripts called chisels. Individual chisels are used to analyze sysdig-captured event streams in various script-specific fashions.

In this tutorial we'll explore the installation and basic usage of sysdig to perform system monitoring and troubleshooting on Linux.

  How to monitor and troubleshoot a Linux server using sysdig