Why does dstat show zeroes for disk activity on my virtual private server running Ubuntu?

Posted by Jonathan Berger on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Jonathan Berger
Published on 2011-03-02T06:56:14Z Indexed on 2011/03/02 7:26 UTC
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I'm trying to monitor the number of disk reads and writes on my VPS (Rackspace in this case) running Ubuntu 9.04. I realize there are many tools to do this, but when using dstat 0.7 I tried the following command:

dstat -d

The output is just two columns of zeroes even when I upload a large file via scp that should be causing a large number of disk writes. Why is this, and how do I get dstat to correctly display the number of disk reads and writes?

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