Advanced dstat
dstat is a versatile tool for generating system resource statistics.
I'm using dstat everyday to quickly find processes that are stressing our systems. Sometimes it's just a "zombie process" that utilizes 100% of all available CPU cores, sometimes there are serious problems you can quickly identify.
First you need to install the dstat tool (I'm assuming you're running debian or ubuntu):
$ sudo apt-get install dstat
The default output of dstat looks like this:
This is not very useful, albeit very easy to type.
When you want to see more details you need to give it some parameters:
-c, --cpu
enable cpu stats (system, user, idle, wait,
hardware interrupt, software interrupt)
-t, --time
enable time/date output
--top-io-adv
show most expensive I/O process (incl. pid and other stats)/qq
--top-bio-adv
show most expensive block I/O process (incl. pid and other stats)
--disk-util
per disk utilization in percentage
--disk-tps
per disk transactions per second (tps) stats
--top-cpu-adv
show most expensive CPU process (incl. pid and other stats)
Put all these parameters together and make an alias, and you will get a very useful dstat output.
$ alias dstat='dstat -tc --top-io-adv --top-bio-adv --disk-util --disk-tps --top-cpu-adv'
Result:
Cheers!