Dstat For Linux

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.