Thursday, November 19, 2009

Dstat a versatile resource statistics tool

Taken from DAG

Dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat, nfsstat and ifstat. Dstat overcomes some of their limitations and adds some extra features, more counters and flexibility. Dstat is handy for monitoring systems during performance tuning tests, benchmarks or troubleshooting.

Dstat allows you to view all of your system resources instantly, you can eg. compare disk usage in combination with interrupts from your IDE controller, or compare the network bandwidth numbers directly with the disk throughput (in the same interval).

Some of the features includes:
  • Combines vmstat, iostat, ifstat, netstat information and more
  • Shows stats in exactly the same timeframe
  • Enable/order counters as they make most sense during analysis/troubleshooting
  • Modular design
  • Written in python so easily extendable for the task at hand
  • Easy to extend, add your own counters (please contribute those)
  • Includes about 10 external plugins to show how easy it is to add counters
  • Can summarize grouped block/network devices and give total numbers
  • Can show interrupts per device
  • Very accurate timeframes, no timeshifts when system is stressed
  • Shows exact units and limits conversion mistakes
  • Indicate different units with different colors
  • Show intermediate results when delay > 1
  • Allows to export CSV output, which can be imported in Gnumeric and Excel to make graphs

Make sure you have rpmforge repository installed.

# yum install dstat

Some of the useful commands are as followed:
# dstat --help 

# dstat --full 

# dstat --vmstat 

# dstat --mem 

# dstat --load

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