iowatcher(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | GRAPHS | EXAMPLES | AUTHORS | COPYRIGHT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

iowatcher(1)                  User Commands                 iowatcher(1)

NAME         top

       iowatcher - Create visualizations from blktrace results

SYNOPSIS         top

       iowatcher [options] [--] [program arguments ...]

DESCRIPTION         top

       iowatcher graphs the results of a blktrace run.  It can graph the
       result of an existing blktrace, start a new blktrace, or start a
       new blktrace and a benchmark run.  It can then create an image or
       movie of the IO from a given trace.  iowatcher can produce either
       SVG files or movies in mp4 format (with ffmpeg) or ogg format
       (with png2theora).

OPTIONS         top

       --help Print a brief usage summary.

       -d, --device device
              Controls which device you are tracing.  You can only trace
              one device at a time for now.  It is sent directly to
              blktrace, and only needed when you are making a new trace.

       -D, --blktrace-destination destination
              Destination for blktrace.

       -p, --prog
              Run a program while blktrace is run. The program and its
              arguments must be specified after all other options.  Note
              that this option previously required the program to be
              given as a single argument but it now tells iowatcher to
              expect extra arguments which it should be run during the
              trace.

       --     End option parsing. If --prog is specified, everything
              after -- is the program to be run. This can be useful if
              the program name could otherwise be mistaken for an
              option.

       -K, --keep-movie-svgs
              Keep the SVG files generated for movie mode.

       -t, --trace path
              Specify the name of the file or directory in which
              blktrace output is located.  iowatcher uses a dump from
              blkparse, so this option tries to guess the name of the
              corresponding per-CPU blktrace data files if the dump file
              doesn't already exist.  To add multiple traces to a given
              graph, you can specify --trace more than once.  If path is
              a directory, iowatcher will use the name of the directory
              as the base name of the dump file and all trace files
              found inside the directory will be processed.

       -l, --label label
              Sets a label in the graph for a trace file.  The labels
              are added in the same order as the trace files.

       -m, --movie [style]
              Create a movie.  The file format depends on the extension
              used in the -o file option.  If you specify an .ogv or
              .ogg extension, the result will be Ogg Theora video, if
              png2theora is available.  If you use an .mp4 extension,
              the result will be an mp4 video if ffmpeg is available.
              You can use any other extension, but the end result will
              be an mp4.  The accepted style values are spindle for a
              circular disc-like effect (default) or rect for a
              rectangular graph style.

       -T, --title title
              Set a title to be placed at the top of the graph.

       -o, --output file
              Output filename for the SVG image or video. The video
              format used will depend on the file name extension. See
              --movie for details.

       -r, --rolling seconds
              Control the duration for the rolling average.  iowatcher
              tries to smooth out bumpy graphs by averaging the current
              second with seconds from the past.  Larger numbers here
              give you flatter graphs.

       -h, --height height
              Set the height of each graph

       -w, --width width
              Set the width of each graph

       -c, --columns columns
              Number of columns in graph output

       -x, --xzoom min:max
              Limit processed time range to min:max.

       -y, --yzoom min:max
              Limit processed sectors to min:max.

       -a, --io-plot-action action
              Plot action (one of Q, D, or C) in the IO graph.

       -P, --per-process-io
              Distinguish between processes in the IO graph.

       -O, --only-graph graph
              Add a single graph to the output (see section GRAPHS for
              options).  By default all graphs are included. Use -O to
              generate only the required graphs.  -O may be used more
              than once.

       -N, --no-graph type
              Remove a single graph from the output (see section GRAPHS
              for options).  This option may be used more than once.

GRAPHS         top

       Values accepted by the -O and -N options are:

          io, tput, latency, queue_depth, iops, cpu-sys, cpu-io, cpu-
       irq, cpu-user, cpu-soft

EXAMPLES         top

       Generate graph from the existing trace.dump:

              # iowatcher -t trace

       Skip the IO graph:

              # iowatcher -t trace.dump -o trace.svg -N io

       Only graph tput and latency:

              # iowatcher -t trace.dump -o trace.svg -O tput -O latency

       Generate a graph from two runs, and label them:

              # iowatcher -t ext4.dump -t xfs.dump -l Ext4 -l XFS -o
              trace.svg

       Run a fio benchmark and store the trace in trace.dump, add a
       title to the top, use /dev/sda for blktrace:

              # iowatcher -d /dev/sda -t trace.dump -T 'Fio Benchmark'
              -p fio some_job_file

       Make a movie from an existing trace:

              # iowatcher -t trace --movie -o trace.mp4

AUTHORS         top

       iowatcher was created and is maintained by Chris Mason.

       This man page was largely written by Andrew Price based on
       Chris's original README.

COPYRIGHT         top

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
       modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 as
       published by the Free Software Foundation.

       This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
       but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
       MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
       General Public License for more details.

       You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
       along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
       Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
       02110-1301 USA

SEE ALSO         top

       blktrace(8), blkparse(1), fio(1), mpstat(1)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the blktrace (Linux block layer I/O tracer)
       project.  Information about the project can be found at [unknown
       -- if you know, please contact man-pages@man7.org] It is not
       known how to report bugs for this man page; if you know, please
       send a mail to man-pages@man7.org.  This page was obtained from
       the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/axboe/blktrace.git⟩
       on 2024-06-14.  (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2024-06-12.)  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
       or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for
       the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original
       manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org

iowatcher                      April 2014                   iowatcher(1)