Using Sar command to report on disk activity

[Nick Tarmey]

How can I get the sar command to report disk activity on all disks on a system? I have tried using

sar -d 1 1

but this only reports on some of the disks in the system namely vg00 & vg01.

[John Palmer · Accepted solution]

I believe that sar only reports on disks that have had some activity during the reporting period.

You could try 'iostat' instead of sar.

[Andreas Voss]

Hi,

sar reports only devices that are active within the intervalls you define.
Try increase the intervall count such as
sar -d 10 1
This will take 10 intervalls

Regards

Andrew

[Kofi ARTHIABAH]

Nick:

If you have configured sar to collect information and keep it (do a man on sa1 and sa2 for details) you can actually get the disk performance details with sar -d

Note that it will only report activity on disks that have had any activity during the period, therefore if you have disks that are not part of a vg, they are not likely to be listed.

[Vincente Fernandes]

Since sar only reports on active disks during reporting, you can setup a cron job for "sar -d" at regular intervals when the disk activity is required.
"iostat" is also a good source to get the disk acitivty.