How to Check Disks I/O Usage in SynetoOS 5

Written By Sebastian Sime (Draft Writer)

Updated at December 24th, 2025

→ Applies to: SynetoOS 5.x

 

Step 1. Connect to SynetoOS appliance via SSH as admin

ssh admin@<your_ip_address_or_hostname>

 

Step 2. Become Super User

sudo su

 

Step 3. Run to check I/O usage of disks

iostat -xz 1
Parameter Usage
-x Displays eXtended statistics
-z Suppresses output for devices with zero activity
-k Displays statistics in Kilobytes (KB)
-m Displays statistics in Megabytes (MB). Recommended for high-performance storage systems
-t Displays a timestamp for each report
-c Displays CPU statistics only
-d Displays Device reports only
-p ALL Displays statistics for all devices and their individual partitions
-j ID Displays persistent device names using their ID instead of device name
-N Displays statistics for LVM logical volumes
1 Updates every second

EXAMPLE OUTPUT

Linux 5.4.0-66-generic (hostname)   05/20/2024      _x86_64_    (4 CPU)

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           0.15    0.00    0.10    0.00    0.00   99.75

Device            r/s     w/s     rkB/s     wkB/s  rrqm/s  wrqm/s  r_await  w_await  aqu-sz  rareq-sz  wareq-sz  svctm  %util
sda               0.00    0.10     0.00      0.85    0.00    0.00     0.00     0.00    0.00      0.00      8.50   0.00   0.00

 

Column Descriptions - CPU Section (CPU Usage Metrics)
avg-cpu Description
%user Percentage of CPU time spent in user mode.
%nice Percentage of CPU time spent by processes with modified priority (niceness value).
%system Percentage of CPU time spent in kernel mode (or system mode).
%iowait Percentage of CPU time spent waiting for I/O (Input/Output) to complete.
%steal Percentage of CPU time stolen by virtual machines (hypervisor wait time).
%idle Percentage of CPU time that was idle (not used by anything).
 
Column Descriptions - Device Section (Storage I/O Metrics)
Device Description
Device Name of the device.
r/s Reads completed per second.
w/s Writes completed per second.
rkB/s Kilobytes read per second.
wkB/s Kilobytes written per second.
rrqm/s Read requests merged per second.
wrqm/s Write requests merged per second.
r_await Average wait time for completed reads, in milliseconds (ms).
w_await Average wait time for completed writes, in milliseconds (ms).
aqu-sz Average size of the I/O request wait queue.
rareq-sz Average size of read requests (in KB if “-k” is specified).
wareq-sz Average size of write requests (in KB if “-k” is specified).
svctm Average service time for I/O requests, in milliseconds (ms).
%util Percentage of device utilization. Indicates how busy the device was during the sampling interval. A value near 100% indicates that the device is fully utilized.