Nalanta

vmstat reports information about processes, memory, paging, block IO, traps, and cpu activity.
The first report produced gives averages since the last reboot. Addi-tional reports give information on a sampling period of length delay.The process and memory reports are instantaneous in either case.

vmstat - Report virtual memory statistics

SYNOPSIS

vmstat [-a] [-n] [delay [ count]]
vmstat [-f] [-s] [-m]
vmstat [-S unit]
vmstat [-d]
vmstat [-p disk partition]
vmstat [-V]

vmstat does not require special permissions.
vmstat reports are intended to help identify system bottlenecks.

Usually system admins and DBA’s requires a link to the site where he can find the necessary informations,
Below are the links which gives more idea about the vmstat man pages,monitoring, analysing etc ..

vmstat
System administration command. Print report on virtual memory statistics, including information on processes, memory, paging block I/O, traps, system and CPU usage. vmstat initially reports average values since the last system reboot. If given a sampling period interval in seconds, it prints additional statistics for each interval. If specified, vmstat exits when it has completed count reports. Otherwise, it continues until it receives a Ctrl-C, printing a new header line each time it fills the screen.

Solaris Performance Monitoring - vmstat

iostat , vmstat and netstat are three most commonly used tools for performance monitoring . These comes built in with the operating system and are easy to use .iostat stands for input output statistics and reports statistics for i/o devices such as disk drives . vmstat gives the statistics for virtual Memory and netstat gives the network statstics .

vmstat command IBM

The first tool to use is the vmstat command, which quickly provides compact information about various system resources and their related performance problems.
The vmstat command reports statistics about kernel threads in the run and wait queue, memory, paging, disks, interrupts, system calls, context switches, and CPU activity. The reported CPU activity is a percentage breakdown of user mode, system mode, idle time, and waits for disk I/O.

Monitoring Virtual Memory with vmstat

Just using a lot of swap space doesn’t necessarily mean that you need more memory.
Linux novices often find virtual memory mysterious, but with a grasp of the fundamental concepts, it’s easy to understand. With this knowledge, you can monitor your system’s memory utilization using vmstat and detect problems that can adversely affect system performance.