How to Calculate Linux System Load Average in percentage

In the world of Linux system administration, monitoring system load is a fundamental task. It helps in understanding how well the system is performing and whether it is under any strain.
Today, we're going to explore a simple Bash script that can provide a clear snapshot of the system's load average and how this translates to CPU usage.
We will also learn how to figure out this CPU use in percentage. This script is a powerful tool for Linux system administrators.

Understanding Key CPU Metrics:

Load average represents the average system load over a specified period (1, 5, and 15 minutes).
For a system with a single CPU, a load average of 1.0 signifies full utilization.
On a multi-core system, a load average equal to the number of cores means full utilization.
Values exceeding the number of cores indicate queued processes waiting for CPU time, potentially leading to slower performance.

This metric counts the number of times the CPU switches from processing one thread or process to another.
High numbers of context switches may indicate that the CPU is spending a lot of time switching between tasks, which can reduce efficiency.

This measures the number of hardware interrupts that the CPU receives per second.
A high number of interrupts could indicate busy or malfunctioning hardware

The script uses the uptime command to fetch load averages for 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

The script then calculates the load percentage for each interval.
This is done by dividing the load average by the number of CPU cores and multiplying by 100.
Formula: It uses the formula (load average / number of CPU cores) * 100 to calculate this percentage.

Based on the script output, if the system load exceeds 100%, it indicates an abnormal state where multiple processes are in the run queue, waiting for CPU resources. This suggests that the system is overloaded.
Conversely, if the system load is less than 100%, it can be considered normal, indicating that the system is operating within its CPU usage threshold and is not overloaded.

#!/bin/bash

#Author: www.virtualnetworkingconcept.com

Hostnames=$(uname -n | cut -d. -f1)

os_type=$(uname -s)

case "$os_type" in

Linux)

# Define color variables

GREEN="\033[0;32m"

YELLOW="\033[0;33m"

NC="\033[0m" # No Color

cputhreshold=99.0

# Get the CPU load averages

load_avg_1min=$(uptime | awk -F'load average: ' '{print $2}' | cut -d ',' -f1 | tr -d ' ')

load_avg_5min=$(uptime | awk -F'load average: ' '{print $2}' | cut -d ',' -f2 | tr -d ' ')

load_avg_15min=$(uptime| awk -F'load average: ' '{print $2}' | cut -d ',' -f3 | tr -d ' ')

# Get the number of CPU cores

cpu_core=$(nproc --all)

# Calculate percentages

percentage_1min=$(echo "scale=2; ($load_avg_1min / $cpu_core) * 100" | bc)

percentage_5min=$(echo "scale=2; ($load_avg_5min / $cpu_core) * 100" | bc)

percentage_15min=$(echo "scale=2; ($load_avg_15min / $cpu_core) * 100" | bc)

if (( $(echo "$percentage_1min >= $cputhreshold" | bc -l) )); then

# Print the table header in a box