Top 15 tools to monitor disk IO performance with examples | GoLinuxCloud (2024)

Related searches: Linux Disk Usage. Top Storage monitoring tools. How to monitor Disk IO performance with examples. How to check disk read write usage on Linux. Check and monitor disk IO statistics and disk stats in Linux using iostat, vmstat and other tools. How to monitor disk IO by process ID for specific process in Linux. Storage monitoring tools. Get disk read write operation details in Linux with examples.

In my earlier article I gave you an overview of different disk types (HDD, SSD, Optical Disks) and disk interface types (SATA, IDE, SAS, SCSI..) in details with pros and cons. Now in this article I will show you various tools along with examples to monitor disk IO performance in Linux environment.

# while true; do cp loadfile loadfile1; done

1. iostat - Report Disk IO Statistics

isotat is part of sysstat rpm. You can install sysstat using yum or any other tool depending upon your environment.

# rpm -q sysstatsysstat-10.1.5-17.el7.x86_64

iostat summarises per-disk I/O statistics, providing metrics for IOPS, throughput, I/O request times, and utilization. It can be executed by any user, and is typically the first command used to monitor disk io performance and investigate disk IO statistics and issues at the command line.

iostat provides many options for customizing the output. A useful combination is -dxz 1, to show disk utilization only (-d), extended columns (-x), skipping devices with zero metrics (-z), and per-second output.

# iostat -dxz 1Linux 3.10.0-1062.9.1.el7.x86_64 (rhel-fews-cc) 01/07/2020 _x86_64_ (32 CPU)Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rkB/s wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await r_await w_await svctm %utilsda 0.28 1.35 2.34 8.52 36.45 510.13 100.68 0.06 5.36 3.79 5.79 0.17 0.18dm-0 0.00 0.00 0.95 0.06 3.81 0.23 8.00 0.00 2.10 1.60 10.66 0.62 0.06dm-1 0.00 0.00 1.65 9.81 30.58 509.90 94.31 0.06 5.32 6.07 5.19 0.12 0.14dm-2 0.00 0.00 1.65 9.81 30.58 509.90 94.31 0.06 5.32 6.07 5.19 0.12 0.14dm-3 0.00 0.00 1.65 9.80 30.63 508.68 94.17 10.69 933.11 12.15 1088.51 0.16 0.18

These columns summarize the workload applied. You can check iostat man page to understand the meaning of each column.

2. vmstat - Report virtual memory statistics

vmstat is another monitoring tool which is part of procps-ng rpm. It is most likely possible that procps-ng is installed by default on your Linux node or else you can also install it manually using yum

# rpm -q procps-ngprocps-ng-3.3.10-23.el7.x86_64

vmstat reports information about processes, memory, paging, block IO, traps, disks and cpu activity. Here we will use vmstat to monitor disk IO performance in Linux using -d for 1 second with 1 second interval.

# vmstat -d 1 1disk- ------------reads------------ ------------writes----------- -----IO------ total merged sectors ms total merged sectors ms cur secsda 667530 12447 7660380 2108711 91090178 3458386 12047478760 1506891675 0 11791dm-0 607338 0 4858728 1760585 206130 0 1649040 5723571 0 1245dm-1 72135 0 2626562 466444 94344918 0 12045847864 1574232872 0 11050dm-2 72135 0 2626562 466583 94344918 0 12045847864 1574410699 0 11050dm-3 72240 0 2630178 905647 94422613 0 12046752440 3064011073 9 12087dm-4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

To get summary disk IO statistics about disk activity

# vmstat -D 1 1 6 disks 3 partitions 1492064 total reads 12447 merged reads 20407898 read sectors 5711511 milli reading 374572389 writes 3460667 merged writes 48208708608 written sectors 7759736862 milli writing 0 inprogress IO 47247 milli spent IO

Follow man page of vmstat to get the complete list of supported arguments using which you can monitor your system resource.

3. iotop - Monitor disk IO Speed

iotop specialises in getting disk stats and is part of iotop rpm. You can install iotop using yum or any other tool depending upon your environment.

# rpm -q iotopiotop-0.6-4.el7.noarch

iotop watches disk I/O usage information output by the Linux kernel (requires 2.6.20 or later) and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes or threads on the system.

With --only iotop will only show processes or threads actually doing I/O, instead of showing all processes or threads so you can check and monitor disk IO performance.

# iotop --onlyTotal DISK READ : 0.00 B/s | Total DISK WRITE : 1103.25 M/sActual DISK READ: 0.00 B/s | Actual DISK WRITE: 699.93 K/s TID PRIO USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO> COMMAND15091 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 965.33 M/s 0.00 % 99.99 % cp loadfile loadfile129926 be/4 root 0.00 B/s  0.00 B/s 0.00 % 15.49 % [kworker/u64:0] 3312 be/3 root 0.00 B/s 137.92 M/s 0.00 % 0.09 % [jbd2/dm-3-]

4. nmon - Monitor System Stats

nmon is not available in the default repository of RHEL/CentOS. You can install if from the EPEL repository. To install the entire EPEL repo on RHEL/CentOS 7

# rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

and to install EPEL repo on CentOS/RHEL 8

# rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm

Next you can install nmon using yum command

# yum install nmon

Alternatively you can also install nmon tool manually

# rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/n/nmon-16g-3.el7.x86_64.rpm

nmon can display the CPU, memory, network, disks (mini graphs or numbers), file systems, NFS, top processes, resources (Linux version & processors) and on Power micro-partition information.

Execute nmon from the terminal

# nmon

To only display disk usage statistics press D

┌nmon─16g─────────────────────Hostname=rhel-fews-cc─Refresh= 2secs ───18:29.30──────────┐│ Disk I/O ──/proc/diskstats────mostly in KB/s─────Warning:contains duplicates──────────││DiskName Busy Read Write Xfers Size Peak% Peak=R+W InFlight ││sda 61% 62.0 240088.7KB/s 3712.48 64.7KB 580% 3316396.1KB/s148 ││sda1 0% 0.0 0.0KB/s 0.0 0.0KB 0% 0.0KB/s 0 ││sda2 0% 0.0 0.0KB/s 0.0 0.0KB 0% 0.0KB/s 0 ││sda3 61% 62.0 240088.7KB/s 3712.48 64.7KB 580% 3316396.1KB/s148 ││dm-0 0% 62.0 0.0KB/s 15.5 4.0KB 58% 1559.6KB/s 0 ││dm-1 61% 0.0 242871.9KB/s 3794.90 64.0KB 580% 3314548.6KB/s218 ││dm-2 61% 0.0 242871.9KB/s 3794.90 64.0KB 580% 3314548.6KB/s218 ││dm-3 61% 0.0 14779.6KB/s 230.92 64.0KB 580% 3145026.3KB/s2181 ││Totals Read-MB/s=0.2 Writes-MB/s=957.7 Transfers/sec=15261.0  │└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

To display disk usage statistics with graph press d

┌nmon─16g──────[H for help]───Hostname=rhel-fews-cc─Refresh= 2secs ───18:25.12──────────┐│ Disk I/O ──/proc/diskstats────mostly in KB/s─────Warning:contains duplicates──────────││DiskName Busy Read WriteMB|0 |25 |50 |75 100| ││sda 60% 0.4 563.8|RWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW> | ││sda1 0% 0.0 0.0|> | ││sda2 0% 0.0 0.0|> | ││sda3 59% 0.4 563.8|RWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW> | ││dm-0 22% 0.4 0.0|RRRRRRRRRRR> | ││dm-1 41% 0.0 568.0|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW> | ││dm-2 41% 0.0 568.0|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW> | ││dm-3 60% 0.0 511.9|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW> | ││Totals Read-MB/s=1.1 Writes-MB/s=2775.4 Transfers/sec=44468.8  │└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

5. atop - Advanced System & Process Monitor

You can again install atop using yum (assuming you had installed EPEL repo) or alternatively you can manually install atop to check and monitor disk IO performance in Linux.

# rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/a/atop-2.4.0-4.el7.x86_64.rpm

The program atop is an interactive monitor to view the load on a Linux system. You can use atop to monitor disk IO by process. It shows the occupation of the most critical hardware resources (from a performance point of view) on system level, i.e. cpu, memory, disk and network.

# atop

Now press shift + d for disk activity
Then press c for full command name..

PRC | sys 6.08s | user 0.05s | #proc 398 | #tslpu 1 | #zombie 0 | #exit 4 |CPU | sys 54% | user 1% | irq 6% | idle 3026% | wait 114% | ipc 0.80 |CPL | avg1 0.99 | avg5 43.05 | avg15 866.47 | csw 122763 | intr 90675 | numcpu 32 |MEM | tot 125.8G | free 105.4G | cache 17.8G | buff 230.0M | slab 938.9M | hptot 0.0M |SWP | tot 3.7G | free 3.7G | | | vmcom 2.7G | vmlim 66.6G |LVM | rhel-root | busy 69% | read 0 | write 65586 | MBw/s 409.6 | avio 0.10 ms |LVM | pool00_tdata | busy 66% | read 0 | write 63780 | MBw/s 398.3 | avio 0.10 ms |LVM | pool00-tpool | busy 66% | read 0 | write 63780 | MBw/s 398.3 | avio 0.10 ms |LVM | pool00_tmeta | busy 9% | read 494 | write 0 | MBw/s 0.0 | avio 1.87 ms |DSK | sda | busy 69% | read 494 | write 61302 | MBw/s 398.5 | avio 0.11 ms |NET | transport | tcpi 3 | tcpo 2 | udpi 0 | udpo 0 | tcpao 0 | PID TID S DSK COMMAND-LINE (horizontal scroll with <- and -> keys) 1/412652 - S 76% -bash 3312 - S 24% jbd2/dm-3-827272 - S 0% kworker/u64:316016 - D 0% kworker/u64:129926 - S 0% kworker/u64:016287 - E 0% cp16290 - E 0% cp

6. collectl - Collects data that describes the current system status

collectl is not available in the internal repo of CentOS/RHEL, so either you can install EPEL repo itself and then use yum to install collectl or manually install it.

# rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/c/collectl-4.3.0-5.el7.noarch.rpm

collectl will collect data that describes the current system status. We can use collectl to check and monitor disk IO performance in Linux. The following command reports CPU and disk IO statistics. Here c and d represent CPU and Disk.

# collectl -scdwaiting for 1 second sample...#<----CPU[HYPER]-----><----------Disks----------->#cpu sys inter ctxsw KBRead Reads KBWrit Writes 0 0 7406 3895 92 23 342208 5347 3 3 2616 2540 20 5 98436 657 0 0 8802 3496 272 68 516096 8064 0 0 1174 620 36 9 65536 1024 2 2 7302 3290 184 46 368640 5760 2 2 17221 6692 500 125 962688 14885

Follow man page of collectl to see all the supported options.

7. sar - Monitor Disk IO Performance

sar is another famous and widely used too and is part of sysstat rpm. You can install sysstat using yum or any other tool depending upon your environment.

# rpm -q sysstatsysstat-10.1.5-17.el7.x86_64

sar is a powerful tool which can be used to monitor all the system resources. But to stick to this article's topic, we will use -d to monitor disk IO performance for 1 second with an interval of 1 second.

# sar -d 1 1Linux 3.10.0-1062.9.1.el7.x86_64 (rhel-fews-cc) 01/07/2020 _x86_64_ (32 CPU)06:43:44 PM DEV tps rd_sec/s wr_sec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util06:43:45 PM dev8-0 6274.00 400.00 796672.00 127.04 142.20 22.64 0.16 100.0006:43:45 PM dev253-0 50.00 400.00 0.00 8.00 0.00 0.08 0.08 0.4006:43:45 PM dev253-1 6225.00 0.00 796800.00  128.00 143.10 22.96 0.16 100.0006:43:45 PM dev253-2 6225.00 0.00 796800.00  128.00 143.11 22.96 0.16 100.0006:43:45 PM dev253-3 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 4285.03 0.00 0.00 100.00

You can check this article to understand about all these columns and other options supported with sar and ksar.

8. blktrace - generate traces of the Disk I/O

blktrace is part of blktrace rpm which should be available in your default repository. You can install it using yum command or other tools based on your environment.

# rpm -qa | grep blktraceblktrace-1.0.5-8.el7.x86_64

blktrace is a specialized utility for tracing block I/O events

Multiple event lines are printed for each I/O. You can also monitor disk IO by process. The columns are:

• Device major, minor number
• CPU ID
• Sequence number
• Action time, in seconds
• Process ID
• Action identifier (see blkparse(1)): Q == queued, G == get request, P == plug, M == merge, D == issued, C == completed, etc.
• RWBS description (see the “rwbs” section earlier in this chapter): W == write, S == synchronous, etc.
• Address + size [device]

# btrace /dev/sda 8,3 3 50080 29.219400645 24545 A W 86921600 + 128 <- (253,1) 85174656 8,0 3 50081 29.219400796 24545 A W 95783296 + 128 <- (8,3) 86921600 8,0 3 50082 29.219400987 24545 Q W 95783296 + 128 [kworker/u64:3] 8,0 3 50083 29.219401336 24545 G W 95783296 + 128 [kworker/u64:3] 8,0 3 50084 29.219401617 24545 I W 95783296 + 128 [kworker/u64:3] 8,0 3 50085 29.219401811 24545 D W 95783296 + 128 [kworker/u64:3]<Output trimmed>CPU0 (8,0): Reads Queued: 312, 9,460KiB Writes Queued: 1,430, 91,400KiB Read Dispatches: 198, 9,460KiB Write Dispatches: 1,430, 91,460KiB Reads Requeued: 0 Writes Requeued: 0 Reads Completed: 198, 9,460KiB Writes Completed: 1,430, 91,460KiB Read Merges: 114, 5,176KiB Write Merges: 0, 0KiB Read depth: 34 Write depth: 255 IO unplugs: 167 Timer unplugs: 0<Output trimmed>Throughput (R/W): 3,714KiB/s / 67,320KiB/sEvents (8,0): 227,220 entriesSkips: 0 forward (0 - 0.0%)

At the end of execution you will get a summary of disk statswith throughput details of read and write operations.

Perf tools are performance analysis tools based on Linux perf_events (aka perf) and ftrace.

9. perf-tools: iolatency

iolatency - summarize block device I/O latency as a histogram and is part of perf-tools, you can download iolatency script from below location

# wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brendangregg/perf-tools/master/iolatency

Provide executable permission to the downloaded script

# chmod u+x iolatency

Next execute the script with -Q option which enables queued time. The -Q option includes the block I/O queued time, by tracing based on block_rq_insert instead of block_rq_issue:

# ./iolatency -QTracing block I/O. Output every 1 seconds. Ctrl-C to end. >=(ms) .. <(ms) : I/O |Distribution | 0 -> 1 : 32 |# | 1 -> 2 : 0 | | 2 -> 4 : 0 | | 4 -> 8 : 0 | | 8 -> 16 : 0 | | 16 -> 32 : 5605 |######################################| 32 -> 64 : 156 |## |^CEnding tracing...

Here the disk latency is between 16 - 32 milliseconds.

You can get some more examples on iolatency on the official github page

10. perf-tools: iosnoop - monitor disk IO by process

iosnoop is another tool from perf-tools. You can download iosnoop script from the below path

# wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brendangregg/perf-tools/master/iosnoop

Provide executable permission to the downloaded script

# chmod u+x iosnoop

It will trace disk I/O with details including latency. Here using -p I have provided the PID of cp command for which ionoop will show the latency value to monitor disk IO by process ID.

# ./iosnoop -p $(pidof cp)Tracing block I/O issued by PID 14823. Ctrl-C to end.COMM PID TYPE DEV BLOCK BYTES LATmscp 8893 W 8,0 1214026496 524288 24.65cp 8893 W 8,0 1214027520 524288 24.74cp 8893 W 8,0 1214028544 524288 24.82cp 8893 W 8,0 1214029568 524288 24.90cp 8893 W 8,0 1214030592 524288 24.99^CEnding tracing...

For more examples and list of supported options you can check the official github page

11. BPF Tools

Traditional Performance tools provide some insight for storage I/O, including IOPS rates, average latency and queue lengths, and I/O by process.

BPF tracing tools can provide additional insight for disk stats and can be used for disk IO performance in Linux.

11.1 BPF Pre-requisite

You must install below rpms to be able to use BPF

• bcc
• bpftool
• bpftrace

Here bcc can be installed from the system repository. Make sure bcc rpm version matches the loaded kernel version. So you can install both rpms together

# yum install bcc kernel

Next install bpftools and bpftrace to be able to monitor disk IO performance

# curl https://repos.baslab.org/bpftools.repo

This will download the repo file and place at /etc/yum.repos.d/bpftools.repo. Now you can install bpftrace and bpftools using yum

# yum install bpftool bpftrace

For more information to install bpftool and bpftrace

11.2 biolatency

biolatency is a BCC and bpftrace tool to show disk IO statistics with latency as a histogram. The term device latency refers to the time from issuing a request to the device, to when it completes, including time spent queued in the operating system. We can use biolatency to check disk stats and monitor disk IO performance.

The -D option in biolatency shows histograms for disks stats separately, helping you see how each type performs.

# /usr/share/bcc/tools/biolatency -DTracing block device I/O... Hit Ctrl-C to end.^C <-- Press Ctrl+C after waiting for few seconds/minutes disk = 'sda' usecs : count distribution 0 -> 1 : 0 | | 2 -> 3 : 0 | | 4 -> 7 : 0 | | 8 -> 15 : 0 | | 16 -> 31 : 0 | | 32 -> 63 : 127 | | 64 -> 127 : 1101 | | 128 -> 255 : 3190 |** | 256 -> 511 : 3855 |** | 512 -> 1023 : 5222 |*** | 1024 -> 2047 : 9027 |***** | 2048 -> 4095 : 23773 |*************** | 4096 -> 8191 : 1256 | |

This output shows disk IO statistics for /dev/sda, an internal disk, with I/O latency often between 128 and 4095 microseconds

11.3 biosnoop

biosnoop is a BCC and bpftrace tool that prints a one-line summary for each disk IO statistics.
It prints a line of output for each disk IO statistics, with details including latency (time from device issue to completion).

This allows you to examine disk IO performance in more detail:

# /usr/share/bcc/tools/biosnoop -QTIME(s) COMM PID DISK T SECTOR BYTES QUE(ms) LAT(ms)0.000000 kworker/u64:1 4434 sda W 708680704 65536 0.00 101.430.000097 kworker/u64:1 4434 sda W 708680832 65536 0.00 101.520.000190 kworker/u64:1 4434 sda W 708680960 65536 0.00 101.610.000252 kworker/u64:1 4434 sda W 708681088 65536 0.00 101.660.000265 kworker/u64:1 4434 sda W 708681216 65536 0.00 101.670.000285 kworker/u64:1 4434 sda W 708681344 65536 0.00 101.68

The biosnoop columns are:

• TIME(s): I/O completion time in seconds
• COMM: Process name, if cached
• PID: Process ID, if cached
• DISK: Storage device name
• T: Type: R == reads, W == writes
• SECTOR: Address on disk in units of 512-byte sectors
• BYTES: Size of the I/O
• LAT(ms): Duration of the I/O from device issue to device completion

11.4 biotop

biotop is a BCC tool that is similar to top but to get disk stats and disk IO statistics in Linux.

biotop [options] [interval [count]]

Options include:

• -C: Don’t clear the screen
• -r ROWS: Number of rows to print

# /usr/share/bcc/tools/biotop -CTracing... Output every 1 secs. Hit Ctrl-C to end23:23:37 loadavg: 2.17 1.58 0.91 4/630 6711PID COMM D MAJ MIN DISK I/O Kbytes AVGms5702 kworker/u64:2 W 8 0 sda 3285 210240 2.626120 kworker/u64:0 W 8 0 sda 486 31104 23.376709 cp W 8 0 sda 18 9088 39.435702 kworker/u64:2 R 8 0 sda 36 144 1.48

Top of the list are kworker threads initiating writes: this is background write flushing, and the real process that dirtied the pages is not known at this point

11.5 bitesize

bitesize is a BCC and bpftrace tool to show the size of disk IO statistics.

# /usr/share/bcc/tools/bitesizeTracing block I/O... Hit Ctrl-C to end.^CProcess Name = kworker/u65:0 Kbytes : count distribution 0 -> 1 : 8 |****************************************|Process Name = jbd2/dm-3-8 Kbytes : count distribution 0 -> 1 : 6 |****************************************|

This output shows the disk stats that both the kworker thread and jbd2 are calling I/O mostly in the 0 to 1 Kbyte range.

11.6 ext4slower

ext4slower traces the ext4 file system and checks disk IO performance for ext4 file system, and then only prints those disk stats that exceed a threshold.

Similar tools exist in bcc for other file systems: btrfsslower, xfsslower, and zfsslower. There is also fileslower, which works at the VFS layer and traces everything (although at some higher overhead).

# /usr/share/bcc/tools/ext4slowerTracing ext4 operations slower than 10 msTIME COMM PID T BYTES OFF_KB LAT(ms) FILENAME16:55:38 dd 23317 W 512 319 18446744073708.55 dummy_file

Here I have a dd command running on another terminal to simulate artificial disk IO statistics

Conclusion

In this tutorial we learned about various Linux tools which can be used to check disk usage by different processes and monitor disk IO Performance. Disk read write plays very important role in how application data is processed between RAM and Disk so it is very important that you have disk with good I/O speed and RPM. I would recommend reading about different available disk types and disk interface types

This would give you an idea on choosing the type of drive which suits your requirement. In production environment we mostly prefer HDD over SSD due to cost and many other factors but for laptops and desktops mostly SSD are used. But now a days even in production environment is starting to move to SSD to support cloud environment.

Lastly I hope the steps from the article to monitor disk IO performance, disk stats and disk IO statistics in Linux was helpful. So, let me know your suggestions and feedback using the comment section.

References

I have used below external references for this tutorial guide
BPF Performance Tools

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