What is drbdtop?

June 2017 ยท 2 minute read

drbdtop is a software that allows monitoring DRBD resources in real-time and executing actions on DRBD resources (e.g., switching a resource to Primary role, disconnecting a resource,…).

drbdtop has two views:

  • Overview
  • Detailed

Overview

When drbdtop is started, its default is the overview mode as depicted in the following screenshot: live

That view presents a live overview about the used DRBD kernel module, the used drbd-utils version, and a compact overview about the state of your DRBD resources. As it can be seen in the screenshot, the resource foo is healthy, while manualtwo is not connected to its peers.

In that view it is possible to view all resources, but it is not possible to interact with them. If you press movement keys (up/down/'k'/'j'), the display switches to a frozen view, where the user can actually select resources as shown in the next screenshot: frozen

Within the frozen view you can execute several actions on the selected resource. This includes searching for a specific resource that matches a regular expression, or interacting with a resource. These interactions are menu driven. For example in the previous screenshot it can be seen that 'r' enters the role menu. In that menu hitting the 'p' key switches the role of the selected resource to Primary.

The menu-driven structure eases interacting with resources for users not familiar with DRBD terminology, as they can enter, look around, and leave menus. Advanced users are not held back, as they can simply press 'rp' without any delays.

Detailed view

The detailed view for a resource is entered by pressing the enter key while a resource is selected. Within the detailed view the user can select multiple modes to present the data of a resource. The following screenshots show the status mode and the in sync mode. status insync