The sys admin's daily grind: Dstat
More Stats
Occasional worries about the system status are part of the sys admin's daily life, and admins usually keeps 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 [2].
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.
That's all well and good, but the real fun with Dstat starts when I look at the list of plugins. The tool's entourage includes about three dozen of them, including a "Hello World" and a "Test" plugin that can serve as jumping-off points for your own add-ons. The plugins cover a considerable range of tasks. No fewer than five of them relate to MySQL, three cover InnoDB, and four cover NFS. Others show the Sendmail or Postfix queue length – even sorted by incoming, active, and deferred – and much more.
[...]
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