DKVIS(1)

💖 DKVIS — visualize disk I/O activity and performance 💖

okay bestie, sit DOWN, because dkvis is about to make your disk activity look like a whole 3D aesthetic. ✨

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🌈 SYNOPSIS 🌈

dkvis [-brVw] [-m maxrate] [-X ndisk] [-Y nctl] [pmview options] [diskid ...]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So dkvis displays a three dimensional bar chart of disk activity. Like, actual 3D bars. main character energy fr fr. 💅

Each row of bars on the base plane represents a disk controller (or host adapter, or bus, depending on your setup), and the bars within a row correspond to the disks attached to the controller. Grouped and gorgeous. 🎀

The label to the left of each row identifies the common part of the disk name for all disks in that row, e.g. dks3 for all IRIX SCSI disks attached to controller number 3. iykyk.

The height of the bars is proportional to the activity. Tall bar = busy disk. No cap. 📊

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🫶 picking your disks

The user can specify a list of disks as diskid arguments using the disk naming scheme reported by:

$ pminfo -f disk.dev.total

e.g. hda or dks0d4 or sda or scsi/host1/bus0/target4/lun0/disc or 20000080e5114459/lun3/c2p1 — literally depends on the type of disks you have, so vibe check your own system first. 🙈

Alternatively, if the diskid argument contains one of the characters ^ or . or [ then diskid will be treated as a regular expression in the style of egrep(1) and the matching set of disk names will be used instead of diskid. regex girlies rise up ✨

If one or more diskid arguments is specified, only the disks in this list are displayed in the view. The disks are grouped in the scene by controller as in the default scene when all disks are present. 🧚

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💜 the pmview handoff

dkvis generates a pmview(1) configuration file, and passes most command line options to pmview(1). Therefore, the command line options -A, -a, -C, -h, -n, -O, -p, -S, -t, -T, -Z and -z, and the user interface are described in the pmview(1) man page. Not me outsourcing the lore. 😭 go read that one too bestie.

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✨ COMMAND LINE OPTIONS ✨

The dkvis specific options are:

• -b — Report the activity as data throughput in Kbytes per second rather than the default I/O operations per second (IOPS). bytes girlie behavior 🌸
• -m — Use maxrate as the maximum activity from which utilization percentages are computed. This effectively specifies the height at which bars will be clipped. If -b is specified the default maximum value is 2048 Kbytes per second, otherwise the default maximum value is 150 IOPS. 📏
• -r — Display the read activity. The default is to display the total (read and write) activity.
• -V — Verbose mode - output the generated pmview(1) configuration file. Spill the tea, show us the config. ☕
• -w — Display the write activity. The default is to display the total (read and write) activity.
• -X — The default arrangement attempts to display up to 12 disks on the same controller in a single row. When more than 12 disks are associated with a controller, additional rows are created in an attempt to achieve a baseplane footprint for the scene that is as close to square as we can manage. 📐

The -X option may be used to over-ride the default layout algorithm and force a scene in which each row contains no more than ndisk disks.

• -Y — The default arrangement attempts to display disks for up to 16 controller rows in a single block. When more than 16 controller rows are present, additional blocks are created in an attempt to achieve a baseplane footprint for the scene that is as close to square as we can manage. 📐

The -Y option may be used to over-ride the default layout algorithm and force a scene in which blocks are assigned such that each contains no more than nctl controller rows.

For backwards compatibility -R is a deprecated synonym for -Y. it's giving legacy, but it still works 🫠

⚠️ Only one type of activity can be displayed per invocation of dkvis, hence -r and -w are mutually exclusive. pick a lane bestie, you cannot do both 💀

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🚀 LAUNCH 🚀

The behavior of pmchart(1) when launched from dkvis is dependent on the number of disks in each row. If there are more than 6 controllers then a separate chart will be generated for each column of disks. In other words, the first disk from each controller in one chart, the second disk in the next chart and so on. Otherwise a separate chart will be generated for each disk controller. organized and unbothered. 👑

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🎀 FILES 🎀

• $PCP_VAR_DIR/config/pmlogger/config.dkvis A pmlogger(1) configuration file for dkvis metrics.
• $PCP_SHARE_DIR/lib/pmview-args Shell procedures for parsing pmview(1) command line options.

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🌸 PCP ENVIRONMENT 🌸

Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the file and directory names used by PCP. On each installation, the file /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables. The $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration file, as described in pcp.conf(4). 🫶

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

dkstat(1), mpvis(1), nfsvis(1), pmchart(1), pmlogger(1), pmview(1), pcp.conf(4) and pcp.env(4).

The Disk and DiskCntrls views for pmchart(1).

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and that's the whole page bestie, you ate that. 💅✨

this iconic lil manpage comes to you from the Performance corner of the DKVIS(1) world — go forth and visualize those disks, you absolute legend. 🌈🦋💖