Dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat, nfsstat and
ifstat. Dstat overcomes some of their limitations and adds some extra features,
more counters and flexibility. Dstat is handy for monitoring systems during
performance tuning tests, benchmarks or troubleshooting.

Dstat allows you to view all of your system resources instantly, you can eg.
compare disk usage in combination with interrupts from your IDE controller, or
compare the network bandwidth numbers directly with the disk throughput (in
the same interval).

Dstat gives you detailed selective information in columns and clearly indicates
in what magnitude and unit the output is displayed. Less confusion, less
mistakes.

Dstat is unique in letting you aggregate block device throughput for a certain
diskset or networkset, ie. you can see the throughput for all the block devices
that make up a single filesystem or storage system.

You can write your own dstat plugins to monitor whatever you like in just a few
minutes based on provided examples and a little bit of Python knowledge.

Dstat's output by default is designed for being interpreted by humans in
real-time, however the new CSV output allows you to store CSV output in detail
to a file to be imported later into Gnumeric or Excel to generate graphs.
