How is the mpstat utility used? What information does it provide, and how can that information be interpreted?

What will be an ideal response?

To monitor CPU performance, you can use the mpstat (multiple processor statistics) command. Without arguments, the mpstat command gives average CPU statistics for all processors on the system since the most previous system boot.The %usr value indicates the percentage of time the processor spent executing user programs and daemons, whereas the %nice value indicates the percentage of time the processor spent executing user programs and daemons that had nondefault nice values. These numbers combined should be greater than the value of %sys, which indicates the amount of time the system spent maintaining itself such that it can execute user programs and daemons.The %iowait value indicates the percentage of time the CPU was idle when an outstanding disk I/O request existed. The %irq and %soft values indicate the percentage of time the CPU is using to respond to normal interrupts and interrupts that span multiple CPUs, respectively. If these three values rapidly increase over time, the CPU cannot keep up with the number of requests it receives from software. If you have virtualization software installed, the %guest value indicates the percentage of time the CPU is executing another virtual CPU, and the %steal indicates the percentage of time the CPU is waiting to respond to virtual CPU requests.The %idle value indicates the percentage of time the CPU did not spend executing tasks. Although it might be zero for short periods of time, %idle should be greater than 25 percent over a long period of time.