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EX442 System Monitoring and Performance Tuning Expertise
Required for the RHCA certification or can be taken independently as a stand-alone credential in its own right.
The System Monitoring and Performance Tuning Expertise exam is only available to current RHCE's and consists of the following exam:
- Systems Monitoring and Performance Tuning: 4.0 hours
In order to earn the EX442 System Monitoring and Performance Tuning Certificate of Expertise, one must successfully complete exam items to earn a score of 70 or higher overall on the section.
Candidates who earn this certification should be able to carry out the following objectives (always check on the official Red Hat website for up-to-date exam objectives):
- use utilities such as vmstat,iostat,mpstat,sar, gnome-system-monitor, top and others to analyze and report system behavior
- configure systems to provide performance metrics over a network via SNMP
- query system performance metrics using SNMP
- configure graphical SNMP client utilities such as MRTG,RRDtool, etc.
- use the Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) mechanism to implement restrictions on critical system resources
- use /proc/sys, sysctl and /sys to examine and modify and set kernel run-time parameters
- use utilities such as dmesg, dmidecode, x86info, sysreport etc. to profile system hardware configurations
- analyze system and application behavior using tools such as ps, strace, top, OProfile and Valgrind
- configure systems to run SystemTap scripts
- alter process priorities of both new and existing processes
- configure systems to support alternate page sizes for applications that use large amounts of memory
- given multiple versions of applications that perform the same or similar tasks, choose which version of the application to run on a system based on its observed performance characteristics
- configure disk subsystems for optimal performance using mechanisms such as software RAID, swap partition placement, I/O scheduling algorithm selection, file system layout and others
- configure kernel behavior by altering module parameters
- calculate network buffer sizes based on known quantities such as bandwidth and round-trip time and set system buffer sizes based on those calculations
