Over the past few years, many IT organizations have begun to adopt internal service level agreements (SLAs) designed to ensure the performance and accountability of IT systems that support critical business functions. If you don't already have an internal SLA for your Linux/Unix server performance and availability, chances are you probably will very soon. The following best practices for managing your Linux/Unix system performance provide useful guidelines that help you set expectations in your organization and establish the metrics on which your performance will be judged.