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I/O Monitoring

We can also monitor CPU usage as well as monitor disk usage with a handy tool known as iostat

mo:~$ iostat
Linux 3.13.0-39-lowlatency (icebox)     01/28/2016      _i686_  (1 CPU)

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           0.13    0.03    0.50    0.01    0.00   99.33

Device:            tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn
sda               0.17         3.49         1.92     385106     212417

The first part is the CPU information:

  • %user - Show the percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while executing at the user level (application)
  • %nice - Show the percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while executing at the user level with nice priority.user CPU utilization with nice priorities
  • %system - Show the percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while executing at the system level (kernel).
  • %iowait - Show the percentage of time that the CPU or CPUs were idle during which the system had an outstanding disk I/O request.
  • %steal - Show the percentage of time spent in involuntary wait by the virtual CPU or CPUs while the hypervisor was servicing another virtual processor.
  • %idle - Show the percentage of time that the CPU or CPUs were idle and the system did not have an outstanding disk I/O request.

The second part is the disk utilization:

  • tps - Indicate the number of transfers per second that were issued to the device. A transfer is an I/O request to the device. Multiple logical requests can be combined into a single I/O request to the device. A transfer is of indeterminate size.
  • kB_read/s - Indicate the amount of data read from the device expressed in kilobytes per second.
  • kB_wrtn/s - Indicate the amount of data written to the device expressed in kilobytes per second.
  • kB_read - The total number of kilobytes read.
  • kB_wrtn - The total number of kilobytes written.

Exercise

Use iostat to view your disk usage.

Quiz Questions

Click the right arrow to view the answers

What command can be used to view I/O and CPU usage? iostat