Hacker News Reader

Good introduction. This is one of the tools that I first used on Solaris, and Solaris iostat is still a little bit better than linux iostat. I'd especially like to have the '-z' and '-M' options in linux.... Maybe it's time I looked at the source code.

This thread is long-dead, but I wanted to add that -M is already in iostat 9.0, as -m. Yesterday's release of 9.0.3 adds -z (if pressed, I'll admit to supplying a patch): http://pagesperso-orange.fr/sebastien.godard/changelog.html

I personally use "iostat -xk 1" which shows the values in kilobytes rather than blocks (easier to read) and updates every second.

Even better is patching Net-SNMP to output %util over SNMP, then pulling the numbers into cacti for various graphs.

dstat is also quite nice.

Iostat -x