netdata/health/guides/disks/10min_disk_utilization.md

Understand the alert

This alert presents the average percentage of time the disk was busy over the last 10 minutes. If you receive this it indicates high disk load and that the disk spent most of the time servicing read or write requests.

This alert is triggered in a warning state when the metric exceeds 98%.

This metric is the same as the %util column on the command iostat -x.

Troubleshoot the alert

• Check per-process disk usage to find the top consumers (If you got this alert for a device serving requests in parallel, you can ignore it)

On Linux use iotop to see which processes are the main Disk I/O consumers on the IO column.

   sudo iotop

Using this, you can see which processes are the main Disk I/O consumers on the IO column.

On FreeBSD use top

   top -m io -o total

Useful resources

1. Two traps in iostat: %util and svctm

2. iotop is a useful tool, similar to top, used to monitor Disk I/O usage, if you don't have it, then install it