dstat Command in Linux With Examples

dstat is a tool that is used to retrieve information or statistics form components of the system such as network connections, IO devices, or CPU, etc. It is generally used by system administrators to retrieve a handful of information about the above-mentioned components of the system. It itself performs like vmstat, netstat, iostat, etc. By using this tool one can even see the throughput for block devices that make up a single filesystem or storage system. 

Installation of dstat command

1. On RedHat based OS

yum install dstat

2. On ubuntu or debian 

sudo apt install dstat

Working with dstat Command

1. To display statistics of major OS components  

dstat

This command will display CPU, Disk, Network, Paging and System stats. 

2. To display information that was to be displayed by vmstat tool 

dstat --vmstat 

The above command results in the process and memory stats. 

3. To display stats of process using most of the CPU. 

dstat -c --top-cpu

This will display the stats of the process which is consuming most of the CPU. 

4. To display stats of process using most of the memory.  

dstat -d --top-mem

This will display the stats of the process which is consuming most of the memory. 

5. To display the list of all plugins 

dstat --list 

Plugins are the options you want to display the stats of. The above command will list all such plugins. 

6. To force float values to be printed 

dstat --float

This will force the float values to be printed which were hidden earlier. 

7. To force bits values to be printed. 

dstat --bits

This will print all the values in bits that were earlier used to be printed in bytes. 

8. To display the output without colors 

dstat --nocolor

This command will now display the outputs in white color only. 

9. To get all stats of the processes. 

dstat -a

This command will display all the stats of the processes. 

10. To display help 

dstat --help

This will display the help section of the dstat command.

Conclusion

The dstat command is an invaluable tool for system administrators to monitor various components of the system in real-time. Its flexibility and ease of use make it an essential part of system performance analysis.