When SAS Technical Support or SAS R&D asks you to monitor the performance of SAS^® code using the nmon command, follow these instructions:

1. In order to evaluate the performance of the system, the monitor should run for a 24-hour period. The running of the monitor should coincide with any SAS processes or workloads that exhibit a problem. Here is the nmon command to launch:
   nmon -f -T -s 300 -c 288

   This command collects 288 episodes of monitors (-c value) at 5-minute intervals (-s value), totaling a 24-hour capture.
   Run the nmon command as the root user so that the output contains the kernel settings.

2. While nmon is running, launch a SAS program that demonstrates the performance problems that you have reported.
   Be sure to first include this code at the top of the program file so that additional diagnostic information is written to the SAS log:
   options fullstimer source source2 msglevel=i mprint notes;
   options sastrace=",,,s" sastraceloc=saslog nostsuffix;
   proc options;
   run;
   libname _all_ list;
      /* your existing program goes here */
3. Allow the monitor to run for the full 24 hours. Do not kill the monitor. If you expect your program to require more than 24 hours to run, increase the value of the -c value in the nmon command above.
4. The nmon command produces an .nmon file. You can zip the file to reduce its size.
   Attach the file and the complete SAS log file to your existing Technical Support track.

You can download nmon for Linux environments from the nmon for Linux page.

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