An in-depth look at Linux: Its inception, adoption, and how to effectively monitor it

With Linux turning 28 years old, the operating system continues to be the predominant choice for serious computing among IT system developers for a variety of reasons, including its stability, secure nature, flexibility, and speed. 

Linux: How the story began

It all started with Linus Benedict Torvalds, a University of Helsinki student trying to install SunOS, a Unix-based operating system, onto his personal computer. Since it wasn't compatible, he learned OS Minix, a clone of Unix. This was later expanded and developed into the Linux kernel. With the help of more than 100 developers, Linus worked on Linux over the next couple of years and, in March 1994, version 1.0 of the Linux kernel was released.

Adoption of Linux: The take off

In the mid-1990s, Linux was a favorite for production environments, mainly because it's open source, inexpensive, and offers high levels of security. Soon, commercial, research, and academic organizations followed suit with Dell, IBM, and HP also offering Linux support.

The Linux platform is popular and highly regarded due to its clear, extensible coding, open source distribution, and the high level of security it ensures. It provides users with a high degree of portability, letting users focus more on innovation and meeting business needs rather than solving integration issues with other applications/platforms. 

Still going strong

Centered on simplicity and modular software development, the Linux platform exists in various forms today, and its role is defined in every component of the IT infrastructure. It is an integral part of emerging technologies too—from cloud computing, virtualization, and cloud functioning to serverless computing. 

As we progress towards interconnected and diverse computing environments, platforms that trigger market and business transformations are in high demand, and businesses will embrace a strong OS platform that provides business continuity. Linux OS meets this requirement in terms of IT stability, agility, and capacity to operate in diverse environments.

Monitoring Linux

With the Linux platform serving as the foundation of enterprise workloads in today's hybrid cloud environments, monitoring Linux has become vital for handling modern IT operations. IT teams have to manage multiple layers of complexities, including emerging problems and new challenges presented by digital transformation, like managing huge amounts of data, data from multiple sources, hybrid cloud environments, etc. 

Incomplete or inefficient data makes it difficult to analyze complex information running through Linux servers and distributions. An efficient monitoring tool that provides the right performance indicators, drills down to the exact problem-causing bug, and resolves issues without manual intervention is the solution.

Site24x7 linux monitoring provides monitoring support for the Linux OS and all its distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, Madriva, Fedora, SUSE, CoreOS, Raspberry Pi, and Arch Linux ARM. This tool provides more than 60 performance metrics—from load average, CPU, memory, and disk utilization to the cron jobs and scheduled tasks running in your servers. In addition, receive root cause analysis (RCA) reports that detail top processes by CPU and memory, trace route map to diagnose connectivity issues, and events that occurred before the server crashed. This helps to drill down to the exact reason behind server downtime and enable faster troubleshooting.

The agent-based server monitoring solution is AI-powered; it detects anomalies before they turn into full-fledged performance bottlenecks. Plus, with a set of ready-to-use IT automation tools, you can automate incident remediation, which is more beneficial than manual interventions. This helps IT teams reduce their mean time to repair (MTTR) and focus on real business needs, rather than continually checking the physical CPUs in the Linux servers to see if they are overutilized or underutilized.

Wrapping up

The Linux story is a remarkable journey. Even after 25 years, the Linux OS platform remains at the heart of the open source environment; almost everything runs on Linux, from web servers to satellites and smartwatches. The future looks more promising with the continued support and adoption of Linux in cloud environments. 

Do you know any other interesting facts or have thoughts to share about Linux? Please share them with us by adding a comment below. 

Also, take a quick look on our milestones in 2019 and what you can look for in 2020!