11. sos Report Missing Features Written on . Posted in sos command.
Despite its comprehensive nature and the fact that the sos repository on GitHub is very active —with more than 300 active contributors from major Linux players worldwide continuously enhancing the project— sos has its limitations. One notable gap is its inability to capture real-time performance data from commands like iostat, mpstat, vmstat, or cifsiostat. These commands are essential for monitoring system performance, especially in diagnosing issues related to disk I/O, CPU usage, memory management, and network file systems.
However if either sar or pcp is installed and configured in your server, sos report will collect some of the historic performance data that these commands record; this may or may not be useful for you depending on how they have been set up and the specific metrics you care about.
The problem with running tools like iostat (or generally xstat commands that have an interval/count sampling model) is that the first iteration of data is misleading (data since boot) so sos report can't simply fire the command and gather whatever comes out.
These omissions remind us that even in the face of the most advanced tools, there is always room for improvement.