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Whether that "work" is to host an application or run jobs to process data, our servers 
need to be doing some sort of work, otherwise, we're wasting money by having 
them. If the load average of your server drops to an abnormally low value, that 
might mean that a service that would normally be running all the time has failed 
and exited. For example, if you have a database server that constantly has a load 
within the 1.x range that suddenly drops to 0.x, that might mean that you either have 
legitimately less traffic or the database server service is no longer running. This is 
why it's always a good idea to develop baselines for your server, in order to gauge 
what is normal and what isn't. A baseline refers to resource usage, most of the time. 
If the resource usage is drastically higher or even lower than the baseline, that's a 
potential cause for concern either way.
Overall, load averages are something you'll become very familiar with as a Linux 
administrator if you haven't already. As a snapshot in time of how heavily utilized 
your server is, it will help you to understand when your server is running efficiently 
and when it's having trouble. If a server is having trouble keeping up with the 
workload you've given it, it may be time to consider increasing the number of cores 
(if you can) or scaling out the workload to additional servers. When troubleshooting 
utilization, planning for upgrades, or designing a cluster, the process always starts 
with understanding your server's load average so you can plan your infrastructure to 
run efficiently for its designated purpose.
Now that we've gone over the important resources that we need to monitor to ensure 
our server remains healthy, let's take a look at a useful utility we can utilize that will 
make resource usage even easier to understand.