Introduction To The Linux Health Checker Tool

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Hello Linux Geeks! How is it going? Today I will like to teach you guys how to take care of your linux machine using the Linux Health Checker which is a command line tool for Linux. Do you want to identify potential problems before they impact your system’s availability or cause outages? Then, this is the right tool for you! Are you curious enough to learn how does all this thing work? How is it possible to identify problems before they impact your system’s availability?

You might want to check my previous article about health-check.

The Linux Health Checker is an open source project sponsored by IBM, it compares the active Linux settings and system status for a system with the values provided by health-check authors or defined by you. This health checker tool for linux works the same as EKG, which is interpretation of the electrical activity of the heart over a period of time. How? After the heart recording is done, the results are compared to the EKG of a normal heart. I took this example to make easy for everyone to understand, so don’t talk about heart and blood when someone asks you about the Linux Health Checker command line tool. Just keep in mind this example so you can tell how this tool works every time you need to explain it to someone.

The Linux Health Checker tool is released under the Eclipse Public License v1.0 and some health checks may require root privileges to obtain required information, so keep in mind to use sudo command when is needed.

Both RPM and source packages are available from the download page.


Make sure that you have installed Perl 5.8 or later. Download the latest source from the website.

Extract it the tar ball. Change to the extracted directory.

# cd /home/oltjano/Downloads/lnxhc-1.2

Install it using command:

# make all install

Run Lnxhc

At the command prompt, enter the following command to run it.

# lnxhc run

The above command will show the summary information about identified problems. To get detailed output, use the following command:

# lnxhc run --replay -V

For questions please refer to our Q/A forum at :

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