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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | GRAPHS | EXAMPLES | AUTHORS | COPYRIGHT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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iowatcher(1) User Commands iowatcher(1)
iowatcher - Create visualizations from blktrace results
iowatcher [options] [--] [program arguments ...]
iowatcher graphs the results of a blktrace run. It can graph the
result of an existing blktrace, start a new blktrace, or start a
new blktrace and a benchmark run. It can then create an image or
movie of the IO from a given trace. iowatcher can produce either
SVG files or movies in mp4 format (with ffmpeg) or ogg format
(with png2theora).
--help Print a brief usage summary.
-d, --device device
Controls which device you are tracing. You can only trace
one device at a time for now. It is sent directly to
blktrace, and only needed when you are making a new trace.
-D, --blktrace-destination destination
Destination for blktrace.
-p, --prog
Run a program while blktrace is run. The program and its
arguments must be specified after all other options. Note
that this option previously required the program to be
given as a single argument but it now tells iowatcher to
expect extra arguments which it should be run during the
trace.
-- End option parsing. If --prog is specified, everything
after -- is the program to be run. This can be useful if
the program name could otherwise be mistaken for an option.
-K, --keep-movie-svgs
Keep the SVG files generated for movie mode.
-t, --trace path
Specify the name of the file or directory in which blktrace
output is located. iowatcher uses a dump from blkparse, so
this option tries to guess the name of the corresponding
per-CPU blktrace data files if the dump file doesn't
already exist. To add multiple traces to a given graph,
you can specify --trace more than once. If path is a
directory, iowatcher will use the name of the directory as
the base name of the dump file and all trace files found
inside the directory will be processed.
-l, --label label
Sets a label in the graph for a trace file. The labels are
added in the same order as the trace files.
-m, --movie [style]
Create a movie. The file format depends on the extension
used in the -o file option. If you specify an .ogv or .ogg
extension, the result will be Ogg Theora video, if
png2theora is available. If you use an .mp4 extension, the
result will be an mp4 video if ffmpeg is available. You
can use any other extension, but the end result will be an
mp4. The accepted style values are spindle for a circular
disc-like effect (default) or rect for a rectangular graph
style.
-T, --title title
Set a title to be placed at the top of the graph.
-o, --output file
Output filename for the SVG image or video. The video
format used will depend on the file name extension. See
--movie for details.
-r, --rolling seconds
Control the duration for the rolling average. iowatcher
tries to smooth out bumpy graphs by averaging the current
second with seconds from the past. Larger numbers here
give you flatter graphs.
-h, --height height
Set the height of each graph
-w, --width width
Set the width of each graph
-c, --columns columns
Number of columns in graph output
-x, --xzoom min:max
Limit processed time range to min:max.
-y, --yzoom min:max
Limit processed sectors to min:max.
-a, --io-plot-action action
Plot action (one of Q, D, or C) in the IO graph.
-P, --per-process-io
Distinguish between processes in the IO graph.
-O, --only-graph graph
Add a single graph to the output (see section GRAPHS for
options). By default all graphs are included. Use -O to
generate only the required graphs. -O may be used more
than once.
-N, --no-graph type
Remove a single graph from the output (see section GRAPHS
for options). This option may be used more than once.
Values accepted by the -O and -N options are:
io, tput, latency, queue_depth, iops, cpu-sys, cpu-io, cpu-irq,
cpu-user, cpu-soft
Generate graph from the existing trace.dump:
# iowatcher -t trace
Skip the IO graph:
# iowatcher -t trace.dump -o trace.svg -N io
Only graph tput and latency:
# iowatcher -t trace.dump -o trace.svg -O tput -O latency
Generate a graph from two runs, and label them:
# iowatcher -t ext4.dump -t xfs.dump -l Ext4 -l XFS -o
trace.svg
Run a fio benchmark and store the trace in trace.dump, add a title
to the top, use /dev/sda for blktrace:
# iowatcher -d /dev/sda -t trace.dump -T 'Fio Benchmark' -p
fio some_job_file
Make a movie from an existing trace:
# iowatcher -t trace --movie -o trace.mp4
iowatcher was created and is maintained by Chris Mason.
This man page was largely written by Andrew Price based on Chris's
original README.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 as
published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
02110-1301 USA
blktrace(8), blkparse(1), fio(1), mpstat(1)
This page is part of the blktrace (Linux block layer I/O tracer)
project. Information about the project can be found at [unknown
-- if you know, please contact man-pages@man7.org] It is not known
how to report bugs for this man page; if you know, please send a
mail to man-pages@man7.org. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/axboe/blktrace.git⟩
on 2025-08-11. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
that was found in the repository was 2025-03-20.) If you discover
any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
mail to man-pages@man7.org
iowatcher April 2014 iowatcher(1)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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