Introduction

There are times when we need to analyze the server uptime and monitor the performance of a running server. Effective monitoring is way better than a worst-case reboot at the last minute. We do have a number of in-built monitoring services and third parties as well. Let’s look at them and dive deeper into “tuptime” and its benefits. 

Monitoring using tuptime

We have a classic uptime utility to monitor the uptime, and the output would be like below:

You can see that the uptime is 170 days. The server has not rebooted for that certain period. However, this seems quite a basic detail, and if you try with the last command, you will see the historical uptime and reboot time.

We have the quick uptime checking utility available, which is the w command. W stands for who and from which IP user has logged in.

Now that it’s time to look at tuptime, let’s see how it works. You will need to install it using the below command.

apt install tuptime 

Once installation is successful, you can run the command tuptime.

There is another method of installing tuptime from git repo. Just clone the repo from https://github.com/rfrail3/tuptime.git

git clone https://github.com/rfrail3/tuptime.git

Once you run the script, it will be installed.

Right after installation. Let’s try it out. Just run tuptime on the terminal.

It provides detailed information about system startups, shutdowns, uptime, and downtime. 

• System startup: shows the number of times the system has been started.
• System shutdowns: shows the number of successful (ok) and failed (bad) system shutdowns. 
• System life: shows the total duration of the system’s life since the initial startup.
• System uptime: shows the percentage of time the system has been up and running compared to its total life span.
• System downtime: This represents the percentage of time the system has been down or unavailable.
• Average uptime: calculates the average uptime duration based on all recorded startups.
• Average downtime: calculates the average downtime duration based on all recorded shutdowns.
• Current uptime: shows the current uptime duration since the last startup.

From the output, it appears that the system has been up and running continuously for 170 days, 9 hours, 44 minutes, and 49 seconds since the initial startup on November 10, 2023, at 04:30:21 AM. There have been no recorded system shutdowns during this period, resulting in a 100% uptime.

Conclusion

There are a lot of utilities for monitoring the uptime of a running Linux server. 

w – shows how long the system has been up and running.
uptime – Shows uptime with certain details. 
last – it shows more of the historical details of logged-in users and their session time on the server.
tuptime – It gives detailed information about system startups, shutdowns, uptime, and downtime.

We will need to be proficient at each command in order to monitor the system effectively.