Linux Disk I/O Monitoring: IOPS, Throughput, and Latency Analysis

Why I/O Monitoring Matters

Disk I/O is often the bottleneck in database servers, build systems, and logging-heavy workloads. Understanding read/write patterns helps identify slow disks, queue depth issues, and I/O scheduling problems.

Reading /proc/diskstats

cat /proc/diskstats
# Fields: reads, read_sectors, read_ms, writes, write_sectors, write_ms, io_ms

Using iostat

iostat -x 1 5
iostat -dx -p ALL
iostat -m  # megabytes

Using iotop

iotop -o  # only active I/O
iotop -b -n 5  # batch mode
iotop -P  # per-process

Automated I/O Monitoring with dargslan-io-monitor

pip install dargslan-io-monitor
dargslan-io-monitor