hello there,
there are countless amount of articles in the net explaining *nix cpu metrics and their meaning.
quick search in one popular search engine produced 30 million results in 0.41 seconds. here are the top 3 results
http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2015/02/24/understanding-linuxs-cpu-stats
http://www.optilabs.eu/en/blog/detail/best-ways-to-find-linux-cpu-information-how-to-get-linux-proce...
http://www.monitis.com/blog/key-linux-performance-metrics/
take a look, bring the data to splunk, get a wide enough set of data, use the MLTK to try and find correlation between different metrics.
please share your knowledge with us.
hope it helps