HPC administrators sometimes assume that if all nodes are functioning, the system is fine. However, the most common issue users have is poor or unexpected application performance. In this case, you need a simple tool to help you understand what’s happening on the nodes.

ASCII tools can be life savers when they provide the only access you have to a misbehaving server. However, once you're on the node what do you do? In this article, we look at stat-like tools: vmstat, dstat, and mpstat.

Logfiles contain extremely useful traces of everyday events – if only they weren’t so boring. Fortunately, special tools help you generate and even animate colorful, easily interpretable graphics.

Even with tons of cores per node today, the traditional sets of tools are still serial-only, utilizing a single core; however, some of the more popular tools have parallel versions, allowing you to use the extra cores either to run the same command in parallel or to perform the same task across multiple nodes.