dstat: a powerful system administration tool

As a system administrator, I’m always looking for new tools to make my job easier. I’ve been using ‘dstat’ now for about 3 months, and it’s something I don’t know how I lived so long without. This tool is quite versatile and informative, and interacts directly with the kernel to give you a nice colorful output of what’s happening on any linux machine.

There are a ton of flags that you can pass to dstat to get the data you want.

Note: most of the flags can be combined with eachother (depending on what you’re looking for) to have it fill your screen with live data. Be sure you have a wide terminal when combining flags, or dstat will detect it and trim valuable output.

Another favorite which combines a ton of information and is very helpful if you want to relate disk activity to network/CPU usage:

# dstat -tcndylp –top-cpu

(This shows you system time, cpu, net traffic, disk io, load avgs, proc stats, and most expensive CPU process)

Possible internal stats are:

aio, cpu, cpu24, disk, disk24, disk24old, epoch, fs, int, int24, io, ipc, load, lock, mem, net, page,
page24, proc, raw, socket, swap, swapold, sys, tcp, time, udp, unix, vm

Some of the most useful parts of dstat are actually built in “modules” which also interact directly with the kernel.

The I/O modules are as follows:

–disk-tps
per disk transactions per second (tps) stats
–disk-util
per disk utilization in percentage
–top-bio-adv
show most expensive block I/O process (incl. pid and other stats)
–top-io-adv
show most expensive I/O process (incl. pid and other stats)

So, to get a live output of how much disk activity is occurring and which processes are responsible, you could combine all of the above and run:

# dstat –top-io-adv –top-bio-adv –disk-util –disk-tps

Caveats: I/O accounting is only available in kernels >2.6.20.

Another of my favorites which combines a ton of information and is very helpful if you want to relate disk activity to network/CPU usage:

# dstat -tcndylp –top-cpu

(shows you system time, cpu, net traffic, disk io, load avgs, proc stats, and most expensive CPU process)

Here’s all the possible flags you can pass to dstat:

-a, –all
equals -cdngy (default)
-c, –cpu
enable cpu stats (system, user, idle, wait, hardware interrupt, software interrupt)
-C 0,3,total
include cpu0, cpu3 and total (when using -c/–cpu)
-d, –disk
enable disk stats (read, write)
-f, –full
expand -C, -D, -I, -N and -S discovery lists
-D total,hda
include total and hda (when using -d/–disk)
-g, –page
enable page stats (page in, page out)
-i, –int
enable interrupt stats
-I 5,10
include interrupt 5 and 10 (when using -i/–int)
-l, –load
enable load average stats (1 min, 5 mins, 15mins)
-m, –mem
enable memory stats (used, buffers, cache, free)
-n, –net
enable network stats (receive, send)
-N eth1,total
include eth1 and total (when using -n/–net)
-p, –proc
enable process stats (runnable, uninterruptible, new)
-r, –io
enable I/O request stats (read, write requests)
-s, –swap
enable swap stats (used, free)
-S swap1,total
include swap1 and total (when using -s/–swap)
-t, –time
enable time/date output
-T, –epoch
enable time counter (seconds since epoch)
-y, –sys
enable system stats (interrupts, context switches)
–fs enable filesystem stats (open files, inodes)
–ipc enable ipc stats (message queue, semaphores, shared memory)
–lock enable file lock stats (posix, flock, read, write)
–raw enable raw stats (raw sockets)
–socket
enable socket stats (total, tcp, udp, raw, ip-fragments)
–tcp enable tcp stats (listen, established, syn, time_wait, close)
–udp enable udp stats (listen, active)
–unix enable unix stats (datagram, stream, listen, active)
–vm enable vm stats (hard pagefaults, soft pagefaults, allocated, free)

Enjoy.

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