Originally posted by: SystemAdmin
> in my AIX 5.3, when I run sar -b, I got the error:
> "0551-201 Cannot open..". I found out that in order
> to use the sar command, I have to su - adm, then
> uncomment the sar job in the crontab and uncomment
> out another line in /etc/rc. Why does this job run
> as default? Is there any disadvantage running it?
I run sar on all my AIX and Solaris systems and have not seen any disadvantages to running it. But there are a million different ways to gather system performance data, and you don't want to waste resources by running all of them. So I think the logic is to keep sar turned off by default, and let the sys admin turn it on if needed. You also need to set the schedule that makes sense for your environment. That is, how often it runs, and what hours of the day it monitors.