Monitoring disk activity

A popular naming convention for monitoring tools is to end the name with the 'top' word (the command used to monitor processes). The tool to monitor disk I/O is called iotop.

Getting ready

The iotop application doesn't come preinstalled with most Linux distributions, you will have to install it using your package manager. The iotop application requires root privileges, so you'll need to run it as sudo or root user.

How to do it...

The iotop application can either perform continuous monitoring or generate reports for a fixed period:

1. For continuous monitoring, use the command as follows:

# iotop -o

 The -o option tells iotop to show only those processes that are doing active I/O while it is running, which reduces the noise in the output.

2. The -n option tells iotop to run for N times and exit:

# iotop -b -n 2

3. The -p option monitors a specific process:

# iotop -p PID

 PID is the process you wish to monitor.

Note

In most modern distributions, instead of finding the PID and supplying...