Correlating performance with dstat
Eventually, we will want to view multiple types of system activity simultaneously. While sar
has many operating modes, its output is linear. Without a tool to interpret its exhaustive data, we are left with a lot of manual analysis of several sar
invocations. While iostat
and iotop
are wonderful tools, they are rather limited in scope by comparison.
So, let us introduce dstat
. While dstat
can't access historical data like sar
, it can display output from several different operation modes side by side. It also includes color coding to easily distinguish units. It's a very pretty command-line tool and it summarizes several different metrics at a glance.
For servers that are of particular importance, we actually keep a terminal window that displays the dstat
results open so that we get an early warning when numbers begin to look bad.
Getting ready
Unlike the sysstat
package, dstat
is ready to use immediately after being installed.
How to do it...
The output from...