Probe disk performance (MRTG)

The hdparam can be used to monitor the throughput speed of a hard disk:
# <strong>hdparm -tT /dev/hda</strong>
/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 888 MB in 2.00 seconds = 444.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 20 MB in 3.30 seconds = 6.06 MB/sec

This would be an interesting performance metric to see plotted against time. So let’s convert it to a format ready for MRTG.

• The only numbers we need are the last ones: resulting speed. This can be parsed from the output as follows:
  #hdparm -tT /dev/hda | gawk -F = "/seconds/ { print $2}" 

  440.00 MB/sec   3.30 MB/sec

• if we could suppose that the results will always be in “MB/sec”, we could parse out the numbers with
  (...) | gawk "{print $1}"
  and then add a line to our MRTG config files to adjust the units:
  kMG[_]: M,G,T,P,X
  But let’s say that KB/sec or GB/sec speeds are possible.
• One gawk can do the conversion trick:
  #(...) | gawk "/GB/ {print $1*1000000000} /MB/ {print $1*1000000} /KB/ {print $1*1000}" 

  440000000 3300000

• To have a complete MRTG-ready output, we also add the boot time on line 3 and the name of the MRTG output on line 4
• Q: Do we need 2 gawks one after the other? Can’t one do it?
  A: You could do it in 1, I guess, but the parsing would be more complex. I use 2 because the FS (field separator) changes: the first gawk uses the ‘=’ character, the second uses the normal whitespace.