Section 4.9. Disk Throughput

4.9. Disk Throughput

Throughput is interesting as an indicator of activity. It is usually measured in kilobytes or megabytes per second. Sometimes it is of value when we discover that too much or too little throughput is happening on the disks for the expected application workload.

Often with storage arrays, throughput is the only statistic available from iostat that is accurate. Knowing utilization and saturation of the storage array's individual disks is beyond what Solaris normally can see. To delve deeper into storage array activity, we must fetch statistics from the storage array controller.