Much has been written about tools to inspect Linux systems, and much has been written about Solaris’s Big Important Tools such as DTrace. But I don’t recall seeing much in the MySQL blogs about basic tools to find one’s way around a Solaris system and discover the system, get fundamental performance, configuration, and status information, and so on. Here’s a quick list of some key tools.
- Many of the tools you’re used to from Linux will work, although sometimes they output different information. An example is vmstat. Many tools such as uptime will work as you’re used to. And of course, Solaris is POSIX compliant, so if a core UNIX utility doesn’t do what you want, the problem is you 😉
- One example of a tool that is often installed on Solaris but should not be preferred is top. Instead, you should use the native Solaris tool, prstat, which is more accurate.
- To display information about processors, use psrinfo.
- To print system configuration (such as sysctl gives you), use prtconf and/or sysdef.
- To print system diagnostic information, use prtdiag.
- To describe the hardware’s instruction set architecture, use isainfo and isalist.
- To discover some low-level hardware details, use smbios.
