Edit: This was supposed to be a primary post; not a reply to jmgarvin's post.
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The only tool in the article that I had not been using regularly is sar. Otherwise I've found that all of them have their place. iostat is great if you have a lot of disk activity and want to see the details. vmstat is great for lots of job control information. I'm surprised that netstat wasn't mentioned. It can be pretty handy once you find the options that you want to pass to it. And, as the article says, you can see a lot just by typing the contents of the pseudo-files in the /proc directory such as /proc//cmdline. Big security hole though.

I always read these articles hoping that I will find something more akin to some of the tools that I have/had on DEC VMS. The VMS monitor utility alone was worth all of these Unix tools and more. Then the VMS command "show" was extremely overloaded with all kinds of things that you could watch.

The only thing wrong with VMS was that the developers didn't keep it current with trends in other products. The Motif GUI stunk and cost a lot of money. There were very few office type applications. The TCP/IP stack was late in coming and was implemented poorly. But as far as the kernel and security were concerned it was great. The system monitoring tools that came standard with the OS were great and you could tune the hell out of the system potentially resulting in enormous performance benefits.

I want my VMS back.