What do you get when you combine vmstat, iostat, ifstat, netstat, and a bunny with a pancake on it’s head?

Dstat! Well, actually dstat and a bunny with a pancake on it’s head - another story. But after you get over the bunny, you’ll realize just how cool dstat actually is. Dag Wieers, one of my favorite sysadmins and famous maintainer of the popular Dag RPM repository, has released dstat.

Combines vmstat, iostat, ifstat, netstat information and more
Shows stats in exactly the same timeframe
Enable/order counters as they make most sense during analysis/troubleshooting
Modular design
Written in python so easily extendable for the task at hand
Easy to extend, add your own counters (please contribute those)
Includes about 10 external plugins to show how easy it is to add counters
Can summarize grouped block/network devices and give total numbers
Can show interrupts per device
Very accurate timeframes, no timeshifts when system is stressed
Shows exact units and limits conversion mistakes
Indicate different units with different colors
Show intermediate results when delay > 1
Allows to export CSV output, which can be imported in Gnumeric and Excel to make graphs

This is an impressive useful tool that summarizes data that you normally would have to combine in multiple displays, and I’m beginning to think might be very useful indeed the more I play with this. Very worth checking out.

Oh, and you can ignore the bunny. He does it all the time (seems to like the attention).