tapestat

TAPESTAT(1)                   Linux User's Manual                  TAPESTAT(1)

NAME
       tapestat - Report tape statistics.

SYNOPSIS
       tapestat [ -k | -m ] [ -t ] [ -V ] [ -y ] [ -z ] [ --human ] [ interval
       [ count ] ]

DESCRIPTION
       The tapestat command is used for monitoring the activity of tape drives
       connected to a system.

       The  first report generated by the tapestat command provides statistics
       concerning the time since the system was booted, unless the  -y  option
       is  used,  when  this  first report is omitted.  Each subsequent report
       covers the time since the previous report.

       The interval parameter specifies the amount of time in seconds  between
       each  report.  The count parameter can be specified in conjunction with
       the interval parameter. If the count parameter is specified, the  value
       of count determines the number of reports generated at interval seconds
       apart. If the interval parameter is specified without the count parame-
       ter, the tapestat command generates reports continuously.

REPORT
       The  tapestat  report provides statistics for each tape drive connected
       to the system.  The following data are displayed:

       r/s
              The number of reads issued expressed as the  number  per  second
              averaged over the interval.

       w/s
              The  number  of writes issued expressed as the number per second
              averaged over the interval.

       kB_read/s | MB_read/s
              The amount of data read expressed in kilobytes (by default or if
              option  -k used) or megabytes (if option -m used) per second av-
              eraged over the interval.

       kB_wrtn/s | MB_wrtn/s
              The amount of data written expressed in kilobytes (by default or
              if  option  -k used) or megabytes (if option -m used) per second
              averaged over the interval.

       %Rd
              Read percentage wait - The percentage of time over the  interval
              spent  waiting  for read requests to complete.  The time is mea-
              sured from when the request is dispatched to the SCSI  mid-layer
              until it signals that it completed.

       %Wr
              Write percentage wait - The percentage of time over the interval
              spent waiting for write requests to complete. The time  is  mea-
              sured  from when the request is dispatched to the SCSI mid-layer
              until it signals that it completed.

       %Oa
              Overall percentage wait - The percentage of time over the inter-
              val  spent waiting for any I/O request to complete (read, write,
              and other).

       Rs/s
              The number of I/Os, expressed as the number per second  averaged
              over  the  interval, where a non-zero residual value was encoun-
              tered.

       Ot/s
              The number of I/Os, expressed as the number per second  averaged
              over  the interval, that were included as "other". Other I/O in-
              cludes ioctl calls made to the tape driver and  implicit  opera-
              tions  performed by the tape driver such as rewind on close (for
              tape devices that implement rewind on close). It  does  not  in-
              clude any I/O performed using methods outside of the tape driver
              (e.g. via sg ioctls).

OPTIONS
       --human
              Print sizes in human readable format  (e.g.  1.0k,  1.2M,  etc.)
              The units displayed with this option supersede any other default
              units (e.g.  kilobytes, sectors...) associated with the metrics.

       -k     Show the amount of data written or read in kilobytes per  second
              instead  of  megabytes.   This option is mutually exclusive with
              -m.

       -m     Show the amount of data written or read in megabytes per  second
              instead  of  kilobytes.   This option is mutually exclusive with
              -k.

       -t     Display time stamps. The time stamp format  may  depend  on  the
              value of the S_TIME_FORMAT environment variable (see below).

       -V     Print version and exit.

       -y     Omit the initial statistic showing values since boot.

       -z     Tell  tapestat  to omit output for any tapes for which there was
              no activity during the sample period.

CONSIDERATIONS
       It is possible for a percentage value (read, write,  or  other)  to  be
       greater  than  100 percent (the tapestat command will never show a per-
       centage value more than 999).  If rewinding a  tape  takes  40  seconds
       where  the  interval time is 5 seconds the %Oa value would show as 0 in
       the intervals before the rewind completed and  then  show  as  approxi-
       mately 800 percent when the rewind completes.

       Similar  values  will be observed for %Rd and %Wr if a tape drive stops
       reading or writing and then restarts (that is it stopped streaming). In
       such  a  case  you  may see the r/s or w/s drop to zero and the %Rd/%Wr
       value could be higher than 100 when reading or writing  continues  (de-
       pending  on  how long it takes to restart writing or reading).  This is
       only an issue if it happens a lot as it may cause tape  wear  and  will
       impact on the backup times.

       For  fast tape drives you may see low percentage wait times.  This does
       not indicate an issue with the tape drive.  For  a  slower  tape  drive
       (e.g.  an  older  generation DDS drive) the speed of the tape (and tape
       drive) is much slower than  filesystem  I/O,  percent  wait  times  are
       likely  to  be higher. For faster tape drives (e.g. LTO) the percentage
       wait times are likely to be lower as program writing to or reading from
       tape  is  going  to  be  doing a lot more filesystem I/O because of the
       higher throughput.

       Although tape statistics are implemented in  the  kernel  using  atomic
       variables they cannot be read atomically as a group. All of the statis-
       tics values are read from different files under /sys, because  of  this
       there  may be I/O completions while reading the different files for the
       one tape drive. This may result in a set of  statistics  for  a  device
       that contain some values before an I/O completed and some after.

       This command uses rounding down as the rounding method when calculating
       per second statistics.  If, for example, you are using dd to  copy  one
       tape  to another and running tapestat with an interval of 5 seconds and
       over the interval there were 3210 writes and 3209 reads then w/s  would
       show  642 and r/s 641 (641.8 rounded down to 641). In such a case if it
       was a tar archive being copied (with a 10k block size) you  would  also
       see  a difference between the kB_read/s and kB_wrtn/s of 2 (one I/O 10k
       in size divided by the interval period of 5 seconds). If instead  there
       were  3210  writes  and 3211 reads both w/s and r/s would both show 642
       but you  would  still  see  a  difference  between  the  kB_read/s  and
       kB_wrtn/s values of 2 kB/s.

       This  command  is  provided with an interval in seconds. However inter-
       nally the interval is tracked per device and can  potentially  have  an
       effect  on  the  per  second statistics reported.  The time each set of
       statistics is captured is kept with those  statistics.  The  difference
       between  the current and previous time is converted to milliseconds for
       use in calculations.  We can look at how this can impact the statistics
       reported if we use an example of a tar archive being copied between two
       tape drives using dd. If both devices reported 28900  kilobytes  trans-
       ferred  and the reading tape drive had an interval of 5001 milliseconds
       and the writing tape drive 5000 milliseconds that would  calculate  out
       as 5778 kB_read/s and 5780 kB_wrtn/s.

       The  impact  of  some  retrieving  statistics during an I/O completion,
       rounding down, and small differences in the interval period on the sta-
       tistics calculated should be minimal but may be non-zero.

ENVIRONMENT
       The tapestat command takes into account the following environment vari-
       ables:

       S_COLORS
              When this variable is set, display statistics in  color  on  the
              terminal.   Possible  values for this variable are never, always
              or auto (the latter is the default).

              Note: On Debian sysstems the colors  are  displayed  by  default
              when  output is connected to the terminal, even if this variable
              is not set (i.e. unset variable is treated as if it were set  to
              auto).

              Please  note  that  the  color (being red, yellow, or some other
              color) used to display a value is not indicative of any kind  of
              issue  simply  because of the color. It only indicates different
              ranges of values.

       S_COLORS_SGR
              Specify the colors and other attributes used to display  statis-
              tics  on  the  terminal.  Its value is a colon-separated list of
              capabilities            that             defaults             to
              H=31;1:I=32;22:M=35;1:N=34;1:Z=34;22.    Supported  capabilities
              are:

              H=     SGR (Select Graphic Rendition) substring  for  percentage
                     values greater than or equal to 75%.

              I=     SGR substring for tape names.

              M=     SGR substring for percentage values in the range from 50%
                     to 75%.

              N=     SGR substring for non-zero statistics values.

              Z=     SGR substring for zero values.

       S_TIME_FORMAT
              If this variable exists and its value is ISO  then  the  current
              locale  will  be  ignored  when  printing the date in the report
              header. The tapestat  command  will  use  the  ISO  8601  format
              (YYYY-MM-DD)  instead.   The  timestamp displayed with option -t
              will also be compliant with ISO 8601 format.

BUGS
       /sys filesystem must be mounted for tapestat to work. It will not  work
       on kernels that do not have sysfs support

       This  command  requires kernel version 4.2 or later (or tape statistics
       support backported for an earlier kernel version).

FILES
       /sys/class/scsi_tape/st<num>/stats/* Statistics files for tape devices.

       /proc/uptime contains system uptime.

AUTHOR
       Initial revision by Shane M. SEYMOUR (shane.seymour <at> hpe.com)
       Modified for sysstat by Sebastien Godard (sysstat <at> orange.fr)

SEE ALSO
       iostat(1), mpstat(1)

       https://github.com/sysstat/sysstat

       http://pagesperso-orange.fr/sebastien.godard/

Linux                              JULY 2018                       TAPESTAT(1)
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