Troubleshooting Disk Utilization

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Troubleshooting Disk Utilization

The ability to diagnose and resolve issues on a Linux system is a skill that every administrator needs to cultivate. In this lab, we cover using various reporting and monitoring utilities to troubleshoot issues with disk utilization on the system.

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Lab Info

Level

Advanced

Last updated

Sep 21, 2025

Duration

30m

Challenge

Install the Monitoring and Reporting Utilities (`sysstat`)
Install the sysstat package using the following commands:
```
sudo -i
yum install -y sysstat
```
Challenge

Use the Monitoring and Reporting Utilities to Diagnose the Issue
This is a list of possible steps to take in order to find the source of the issue. All of these can be used, but they are not all required. Once located, the offending process should be copied to /home/cloud_user/.
```
top
vmstat 1 4
iostat -y 1 3
iostat -dy -p xvdg 1 3
lsblk
lsof | grep “mount point or device major,minor number”
ps -ef | grep (PID of dalinar.sh)
pstree -p (PID of dalinar.sh)
cp /mnt/roshar/dalinar.sh /home/cloud_user/
```
Challenge

Terminate the Offending Process
Once the PID of the offending process has been located (dalinar.sh), use the kill command to terminate it.
```
kill -15 (PID of dalinar.sh)
```

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