Linux disk usage monitor

9 Tools to Monitor Linux Disk Partitions and Usage in Linux

In this article, we will review a number of Linux command line utilities that you can use to check disk partitions in Linux.

Monitoring storage device(s) space usage is one of the most important tasks of a SysAdmin, this helps to ensure adequate free space remains on the storage devices for efficient running of your Linux system.

Command Line Utilities To Print Linux Disk Partition Table

The following is a list of command line utilities for printing storage device partition table and space usage.

1. fdisk (fixed disk) Command

fdisk is a powerful and popular command line tool used for creating and manipulating disk partition tables.

It supports GPT, MBR, Sun, SGI and BSD partition tables. You can run fdisk commands through its user-friendly, text based and menu driven interface to display, create, resize, delete, modify, copy and move partitions on storage disks.

The fdisk command below will print the partition table of all mounted block devices:

For more usage and examples about fdisk command read 10 ‘fdisk’ Command Examples to Manage Partitions

2. sfdisk (scriptable fdisk) Command

sfdisk works more like fdisk, it prints or manipulates a storage disk partition table. However, sfdisk offers extra features not available in fdisk. You can use it just as fdisk, it also supports GPT, MBR, Sun and SGI partition tables.

One difference between the two is that sfdisk does not create the standard system partitions for SGI and SUN disk labels like fdisk does.

For more usage, go through sfdisk man pages.

3. cfdisk (curses fdisk) Command

cfdisk is simple program used for printing and managing disk partitions. It offers basic partitioning functionality with a user-friendly interface. It operates similar to the more powerful commands: fdisk and sfdisk allowing users to view, add, delete, and modify hard-disk partitions.

Use the right and left arrow keys to move the highlighter over the menu tabs.

4. Parted Command

parted is also a well-known command line tool for displaying and manipulating disk partitions. It understands multiple partition table formats, including MBR and GPT.

Parted can be used for creating space for new partitions, reorganizing disk usage, and copying data to new hard disks and beyond.

5. lsblk (list block) Command

lsblk prints information including name, type, mountpoint concerning all available or particular mounted block device(s) excluding RAM disks.

6. blkid (block id) Command

blkid a utility that locates or displays block device attributes (NAME=value pair) such as device or partition name, label, its filesystem type among others.

7. hwinfo (hardware info) Command

hwinfo generally prints detailed information about system hardware. But you can run the hwinfo command below, where you employ the — option to list all hardware items of the specified type (in this case block devices such as disks and their partitions).

To restrict the information to a summary, use —short option as in the command below:

Make sure hwinfo tool installed on your system to get the above results..

Command Line Utilities To Monitor Disk Space Usage in Linux

The following is a list of command line utilities for monitoring Linux disk space usage.

8. df (disk filesystem) Command

df prints a summary of file system disk space usage on the terminal. In the command below, -hT switch enables reporting of the disk size, used space, available space and used space percentages in human-readable format.

9. pydf (python df) Command

pydf is an exceptional Python command line utility and a great replacement of df in Linux. It uses distinct colors to highlight disk partitions with specific attributes.

Make sure pydf utility installed on the system, if not install it using Install Pydf Tool to Monitor Linux Disk Usage.

What if a disk/partition is running out of space in Linux?

Once you realize that any of your storage disk(s) is running out of space or is full, you should:

1. First, make a backup of all your important files on the system using any of the Linux system backup tools.
2. Next, check which files or directories are occupying the biggest amount of space on the disk(s) using the du command.
3. Then delete from the storage disk(s), any files that are no longer important or that you will not use in the future with the help of rm command or you can fslint tool to find and delete unwanted files in Linux.
4. If your root partition is getting full, you can resize root partition using LVM, it should be pretty straight.

Note: In case you delete any important file, you can recover the deleted file in Linux.

In this article, we have talked about a number of useful command line utilities for displaying storage disk partition table and monitoring space usage.

If there is any important command line utility for the same purpose, that we have left out? Let us know via the comment section below. You can possibly ask a question or provide us feedback as well.

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Top 15 tools to monitor disk IO performance with examples

Table of Contents

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

To get summary disk IO statistics about disk activity

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.

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.

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

and to install EPEL repo on CentOS/RHEL 8

Next you can install nmon using yum command

Alternatively you can also install nmon tool manually

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

To only display disk usage statistics press D

To display disk usage statistics with graph press d

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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

Provide executable permission to the downloaded script

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 :

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

Provide executable permission to the downloaded script

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.

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.

Credits: BPF Performance Tools

11.1 BPF Pre-requisite

You must install below rpms to be able to use BPF

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

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

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

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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).

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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