-d 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.

-t controls the name of the blktrace file. iowatcher uses a dump from blkparse, so -t tries to guess the name of the corresponding per CPU blktrace data files if the dump file doesn't already exist.

If you want more than one trace in a given graph, you can specify -t more than once.

-F Add a fio bandwidth log graph. You need to run fio --bandwidth-log to get one of these, and then pass either the read log or the write log into iowatcher.

-l Sets a label in the graph for a trace file. The labels are added in the same order the trace files are added. The labels for fio traces are added after all the other traces.

-m Create a movie. The file format depends on the extension used in the -o filename.* 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 avilable. You can use any other extension, but the end result will be an mp4.

You can use --movie=spindle or --movie=rect, which changes the style of the IO mapping.

-T Set a title for the graph. This goes at the top of the image.

-o output filename. The default is trace.svg. iowatcher is only able to create svg for now.

-r control the duration in seconds for the rolling average. iowatcher tries to smooth out bumpy graphs by averaging the current second with seconds from the past. Longer numbers here give you flatter graphs.

-P add per-process tags to the IO. Each process responsible for submitting the IO gets a different color.

-O add a single graph to the output. By default all the graphs are included, but with -O you get only the graphs you ask for. -O may be used more than once.

-N remove a single graph from the output. This may also be used more than once.

Choices for -O and -N are:

io, fio, tput, latency, queue_depth, iops, cpu-sys, cpu-io, cpu-irq, cpu-user, cpu-soft

Examples

Generate graph from the existing trace.dump
iowatcher -t trace.dump -o trace.svg
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
Graph an existing trace and Fio bandwidth log together
iowatcher -t trace -F agg-write_bw.log -O fio -O tput

iowatcher

Download

Output

Sample Graphs

Sample Video

Building

The basic options

Examples