Monitoring volume usage with ONTAP File System Analytics

File system analytics present detailed information at each level of the volume’s file system hierarchy, allowing you to:

• assess capacity usage and trends
• monitor file and directory counts
• evaluate file activity and history

When enabled in ONTAP 9.8 and later releases, file system analytics can be displayed using ThinkSystem Storage Manager for DM Series. You can also use ONTAP REST APIs to access the data programmatically.

Enabling file system analytics is expected to have a performance impact. You might choose not to enable analytics if maximal performance is required in your environment. You can also disable analytics if your testing shows that the performance impact is unacceptable. When you disable analytics, previously collected data is no longer displayed for that volume.

File system analytics can consume storage space, and it should not be run on transitioned volumes that are close to maximum capacity.

File System Analytics is not currently available for the following volume types:

• FlexCache destination volumes
• SnapMirror destination volumes
  Note

  If you have enabled file system analytics on volumes whose containing SVM is in a protection relationship, the analytics data is not replicated to the destination SVM. If the source SVM must be resynchronized in a recovery operation, you must manually reenable analytics on desired volumes after recovery.
• SnapLock volumes
• volumes containing LUNs
• volumes used only to hold SMB/CIFS audit logs
• node root volumes (/mroot)