How can System Monitor display disk io?

Question

I can't imagine this is not possible.... but I can't figure out where to enable it.

can't system monitor (gnome-system-monitor) display disk io?

Answer 1

You can try nmon

sudo apt-get install nmon

Try:

nmon

Output Like below:

Press d = Disk Press c = CPU Press r = RAM Press q to exit

You can also give try with:

iostat

Output like below:

Linux 3.16.0-30-generic (client01)    03/01/2016      _i686_  (2 CPU)

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
      39.73   24.58    2.96    0.26    0.00   32.48

Device:            tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn
sda               3.32        57.31        40.05  119879872   83767716
sdb               1.45        15.02        22.60   31424408   47273012

Answer 2

Why you don't use iostat :

sudo apt-get install sysstat

iostat is found in sysstat package .

For example :

iostat -d 30 /dev/sda 

will give you I/O result in 30 s interval

Answer 3

You can use system monitor from KDE (ksysguard), open it, go to file and click on "download new tabs" then, you can download disc io.

Anyway, lots of tools let you watch disc IO, for example gnome-shell plugins, Unity indicators, KDE plasmoids or conky.

Answer 4

I gave up on gnome-system-monitor for this reason.

On my 12.04 machines I installed indicator-multiload. Once installed you can use the Preferences page to get it so show disk i/o - along with memory, swap, network, etc...

Answer 5

There are lot of tools to monitor system stats. I have written a script for system profiling. You can use this as well more over.

You can use iotop & iostat. They will give you a better representation of system utilization. sysstat package will give you access to other monitoring utilities.

# apt-get install iotop sysstat
# iostat -dx
Linux 4.4.0-64-generic (ip-172-16-27-59)        03/10/2017      _x86_64_        (4 CPU)

Device:  rrqm/    swrqm/s     r/s     w/s     rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
xvda              0.00     4.36    0.83    2.77    15.64    56.59    40.14     0.01    2.18    0.82    2.59   0.63   0.23
xvdb              0.00     0.09    0.01    0.11     0.06     7.21   120.59     0.00    1.29    0.85    1.35   0.34   0.00

From man iostat:

r/s
     The number (after merges) of read requests completed per second for the device.
w/s
     The number (after merges) of write requests completed per second for the device.
rsec/s (rkB/s, rMB/s)
     The number of sectors (kilobytes, megabytes) read from the device per second.
wsec/s (wkB/s, wMB/s)
     The number of sectors (kilobytes, megabytes) written to the device per second.

These values give you exact idea about Disk IO.

Answer 6

You could try Stacer

sudo apt install stacer

It looks like a good option if you want/need a graphical interface. It has many other features. Screenshot

Answer 7

The new System Monitor in GNOME 3.26 can do that.

You can easily upgrade to Ubuntu 17.10 to get the new version.