The sys admin’s daily grind: Dstat

More Stats

Author(s):

Occasional worries about the system status are part of the sys admin’s daily life, and admins usually keep a fat toolbox of top and stat tools to alleviate them. Charly says he can manage with just one multitool – for the time being, at least.

How many times have I written about tools that have “top” or “stat” in their names? It feels like umpteen times. Today, Dstat [1] makes it umpteen+1. This tool, which many distributions already have in their repositories, claims it will save me the trouble of making that umpteen+ 2 times, while sending many system reporting tools into a well-earned retirement.

Although Dstat suffers from no shortage of parameters, I first called it without any. The results are lines of the most important system data written once a second (Figure 1). But, if you want to drill into the depths of the network, you can use the ‑tcp and ‑udp switches. Using ‑N eth1 restricts the output to a single interface. As for the network, other parameters can help bring details to light for all other system components.

Read full article as PDF:

065-065_charly.pdf (405.18 kB)

Related content

  • System Diagnosis Tools

    To check on the health of a Linux system, administrators can turn to vmstat, iostat, netstat, and ifstat. Or, you can just use the versatile dstat, which combines the features of several tools in a single package.

    more »
  • Charly's Column

    A partly overloaded DNS server can slow down all the workstations on the network. Dnsgraph is an early warning system that gives administrators a graph of critical values. Your Dnsgraph charts will help you keep your systems serving names.

    more »
  • Table of Contents: 150

    This month, Rasp Pi becomes a multimedia system, then we look at three great tools to create, manage, and monitor your virtual environments.

    more »
  • Charly's Column: Terminator

    Friends are all about friendship – names and appearances typically don’t play any role at all. Sys admin Charly’s friend the Terminator is a convincing example.

    more »
  • Charly's Column

    Parallel SSH is the name of an easy-to-configure tool that our resident sys admin, Charly, now routinely deploys whenever he needs to launch the same programs, copy the same files, or kill the same processes simultaneously on multiple computers.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus

Visit Our Shop

Trial Subscription

Digital Subscription

Subscribe

Direct Download

Read full article as PDF:

065-065_charly.pdf (405.18 kB)

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Kernel Linux Mobile Programming Red Hat Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software

News