Collect and analyze all the data collected by a running SAR daemon

WHEN : when you have to monitor one or more metrics of a host for a long period of time (eg: for weeks or months), or you want to be prepared to quickly answer performance question about that hosts in minutes.
THE CASE : you're managing a production server farm and you want to be ready for every performance-related question about the hosts (of course, you have to configure the SAR daemon first).

Host configuration

  1. configure sar command on the host (please note that if you customize the "sa" folder, you have to customize it also in the sadfbi.sh script)
  2. upload sadfbi.sh on the target host

When you need the data

  1. run sadfbi.sh with the sadf parameter of the metric you want to "prepare" for PowerBI or without that parameter to obtain a lot of ".csv" files, one for each metric (this is my way). You could also schedule sadfbi in crontab at the end of each day to have the csv files always ready.
  2. download .csv files via sftp, scp, or with your preferred protocol
  3. open the pbix files (you could use one from the samples) in PowerBI and, if needed, modify the datasource path as in "On your workstation" section of guide_sadfbi_version_10