The sysstat package contains the following system performance tools: - sar: collects and reports system activity information; - iostat: reports CPU utilization and disk I/O statistics; - tapestat: reports statistics for tapes connected to the system; - mpstat: reports global and per-processor statistics; - pidstat: reports statistics for Linux tasks (processes); - sadf: displays data collected by sar in various formats; - cifsiostat: reports I/O statistics for CIFS filesystems.

The statistics reported by sar deal with I/O transfer rates, paging activity, process-related activities, interrupts, network activity, memory and swap space utilization, CPU utilization, kernel activities and TTY statistics, among others. Both UP and SMP machines are fully supported.