topic Re: Iostat analysis in Operating System - Linux

Iostat analysis

Max Sorokin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:45:05 GMT

Hi All,

Is there some tool for graphic representation of iostat files?

BR,
Max

Re: Iostat analysis

John McNulty_2 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:08:55 GMT

You probably want to do something like this:

http://linuxshellaccount.blogspot.com/2008/04/perl-script-to-graph-iostat-output-on.html

John

Re: Iostat analysis

Tim Nelson — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:36:57 GMT

Something else worth looking at is HPOV Glance for Linux and HPOV Performance Manager with associated OV Performance agent for linux.

Found under the HP BTO software site.
https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpdc/display/main/search_results.jsp?zn=bto&cp=54_4012_100__

Re: Iostat analysis

Max Sorokin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:39:09 GMT

Thanks guys, but it is not what i'm looking for :( i need a tool like windows performance monitor, to import iostat files and represent it with graphs.

Re: Iostat analysis

Ivan Ferreira — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:10:47 GMT

If you use "sar -d" instead of iostat, you can use ksar to graph the results.

If you use collectl instead of iostat, you can also graph your results.

Please don't forget to assign points to the answers you get.

Re: Iostat analysis

John McNulty_2 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:14:48 GMT

Max, you've not said what flavour of Linux you're running and this is relevant if you want to use sar as some distros are more up to date than others. I'll assume Redhat.

Redhat (and therefore CentOS too) ship a very old version, 7.0.2-3 - about 2.5 years old - and it's missing a lot of features. Not to mention that Redhat's implementation is quite crap. The init script provided to start the sadc data collector is only half written and what's there doesn't work at all. It has no interval on the command line which causes it to exit immediately without doing anything, and it should also be run in the background. God knows what the person who wrote that script was smoking, but it's an embarrassment. If you look you'll find that some daily data is being collected already in /var/log/sa. The sadd files (where dd = the day of the month) contain data collected for 1 second every 10 mnutes, and the sardd files are reports created from the day's data. You'll find that this data is being generated from a cron job here:

/etc/cron.d/sysstat.

I'd stop this fron running, clean out the files in /var/log/sa and set up sadc to run correctly. Note: By default sadc won't collect any disk data unless you run it with the -d flag.

In fact, I'd get rid of the supplied sysstat package and download the latest version from here:

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/sebastien.godard

The new version comes with a replacement for the sar datafile reader called sadf that can write reports in a number of different output formats: CSV, XML, etc. There's also a tool in the new kit called isag (Interactive System Activity Grapher) that can read the binary datafiles and produce graphs from them.

Hope this helps.

Re: Iostat analysis

John McNulty_2 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:32:45 GMT

I just noticed there's a brand new version released today: 9.0.6 that includes a new utility called sargraph that can produce graphs from the XML output from sadf. Will have to give this a try myself :)

Re: Iostat analysis

Max Sorokin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:58:58 GMT

I'm using XenServer 5.5 with kernel 2.6.18-128.1.6.el5.xs5.5.0.496.1012xen, and it's pain in the ass to install something new on this system :(