2.8. Other means for auditing

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 offers quite a few more tools with which to perform system auditing and analysis. Most of them can be used as a supplementary sources of information in case you want to verify what you have discovered already or in case you need more in-depth information on certain parts. Many of these tools are used for performance tuning as well. They include:

vmstat: vmstat gives you detailed information about processes, memory, paging, block I/O, traps, and CPU activity. Use it to take a closer look at what the system overall does and where it is busy.
iostat: iostat is similar to vmstat, but only for I/O on block devices. It also provides more verbose output and statistics.
blktrace: blktrace is a very detailed block I/O trace program. It breaks down information to single blocks associated with applications. It is very useful in combination with diskdevstat.