Dstat 0.6.4 review

Dstat project is a versatile replacement for iostat, vmstat and ifstat

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: dag

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Dstat project is a versatile replacement for iostat, vmstat and ifstat. Dstat overcomes some of the limitations and adds some extra features.

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).

Dstat also cleverly gives you the most detailed information in columns and clearly indicates in what magnitude and unit the output is displayed. Less confusion, less mistakes.

Dstat is also unique in letting you aggregate block device throughput for a certain diskset or network bandwidth for a group of interfaces, ie. you can see the throughput for all the block devices that make up a single filesystem or storage system.

You can customize your dstat output from /etc/dstat.conf and you can write your own dstat modules to plug into the dstat output.

Dstat's output by default is optimized for being interpreted by humans in real-time, however the new CSV output allows you to store CSV output to a file to be imported later into Gnumeric or Excel to generate graphs.

Here are some key features of "Dstat":
Combines vmstat, iostat and ifstat information (in exactly the same timeframe)
Modular design
Enable/order counters as they make most sense during analysis/troubleshooting
Easy to extend, add your own counters (please contribute those)
Can summarize grouped block devices and see 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
Written in python so easily extendable for the task at hand
Allows to export CSV output
CSV output can be imported in Gnumeric and Excel to make graphs

Requirements:
Dstat exists currently in 2 versions, one for python 2.0 and on for python 1.5 (see subversion: dstat15).
It has been tested with different sets of 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Please copy&paste the output if you have problems. (Also include the involved /proc entries)

What's New in This Release:
This release adds openvz plugins.
It integrates human-readable clock output in dstat.
There are visual improvements in the output.
This release filters out md and dm block devices in default discovery.