No idle time was being reported the CPU was spending all of its time between user and system tasks. In the output shown above, we saw evidence that the system being queried was fairly busy. If you don't specify the number of intervals, the command will continue running until you stop it with a ^c. In this 'no options' approach, you can still set the timing for each interval in seconds and the number of intervals you want to see reported. To overcome this with little effort, simply add the -a option. You probably noticed the 'You did not select any stats' message near the top of the output displayed above.

total-cpu-usage-dsk/total-net/total-paging-system. You did not select any stats, using -cdngy by default. The output of this command will look something like what you see below. If you don't supply any options with dstat, the command will use a default set (-cdngy) set of options.

In this example, we see that the system on average has been largely idle (96%), but is now quite busy working between user and system processing tasks. Note that the first line of data in this report, which looks very different than the others, gives you the averages since the system was last booted and is returned immediately regardless of the specified interval.

Linux cpu stats