Reading out the current and past monitoring information on a LANCOM R&S®Unified Firewall via the CLI command "atop"

Description:

For analysis and monitoring purposes it is useful to check various information of network devices (e.g. CPU and memory load). On a LANCOM R&S®Unified Firewall this can be achieved with the CLI command atop. As atop creates snapshots of the last 30 days, it is also possible to view monitoring information of the LANCOM R&S®Unified Firewall within this time range in the aftermath. 

This article describes how monitoring information of a Unified Firewall can be viewed with the CLI command atop and how the monitoring information of the last 30 days can be accessed.

Requirements:

• LANCOM R&S®Unified Firewall with LCOS FX as of version 10.3
• SSH client (e.g. PuTTY)

Procedure:

Reading out the current monitoring information on a Unified Firewall:

1) Connect to the Unified Firewall with an SSH client and login with the user gpadmin.

2) Enter the command atop.

3) The information is updated in a 10 second interval. The following keys can be used for navigation (common commands):

• <z> - Pauses the update until the key <z> is pressed again
• <i> <number> <Enter key> - Changes the update interval to the desired value
• <g> - Changes to the CPU specific view (default view), processes are sorted by CPU load (CPU)
• <m> - Changes to the memory specific view, processes are sorted by memory load (MEM)
• <c> - Displays the background processes (the sorting is based on the used view)
• <q> - Closes atop

Reading out a snapshot of the last 30 days:

atop creates a snapshot every 10 minutes and writes it into a logfile. A separate logfile is created for each day. It is possible to navigate between the snapshots within the logfiles, so that monitoring information of a specific time or time range can be viewed.

1) Enter the command cd /var/log/atop to change to the folder with the logfiles created by atop.

2) Enter the command ll to display the contents of the folder. The logfiles are named according to the scheme atop_<year><month><day> .1 (e.g. atop_20220902.1).

3) Enter the command atop -r followed by the logfile name (in this example atop -r atop_20220902.1).

4) The following keys can be used for navigation (common commands):

• <t> - Next snapshot (10 minutes forwards)
• <T> - Previous snapshot (10 minutes backwards)
• <g> - Changes to the CPU specific view (default view), processes are sorted by CPU load (CPU)
• <m> - Changes to the memory specific view, processes are sorted by memory load (MEM)
• <d> - Changes to the disk specific view, processes are sorted by the used harddisk space (DSK)
• <c> - Displays the background processes (the sorting is based on the used view)
• <q> - Closes atop