UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

i know you said no docs but sorry bud... youre in unix land!! everything including the kitchen "sync" has a man page. so here we go.

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

good starter docs on how to start programming shell scripts.

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however, if you tell us what you are trying to monitor and what not, we can help you along. the commands sar,df,du,vmstat,iostat,prtdiag,prtconf,netstat, etc etc etc are all good basic steps in your direction.

there are plenty of reporting tools out there as well.

What you need to do, in the following rough order, is:
a) determine what you want to look at
b) begin trying out different commands to see what you can learn and what the output looks like
c) pick formats for what you wan tthe output to look like of the analysis
d) finalize program to create desired output
e) automate so as to run regularly (as a cron job) or on an as-needed basis

So... start at step (a) ...

Also go and get yourself a good scripting book like the O'Reilly set, you will find them invaluable. Also Google, Wikipedia are a good source for man pages.

You really need to get to grips with shell scripting before you try writing even simple (Noddy) monitoring scripts.