Disabling NetApp Growth Rate Abnormal Alert

NetApp DataFabric Manager has one annoying alert, which notifies that space utilization of the volume increases more quickly than expected. I used to receive dozens of these alerts each morning until I had done the following:

> dfm eventtype modify -v information volume-growth-rate:abnormal

This command changes the default severity for this event from warning to informational. Since my notifications configured to send everything higher or equal to warning, I no longer receive this alert.

There is a “volume full” event which triggers at 90%, I believe, which is enough for me.

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NetApp Operations Manager Efficiency Dashboard

Fancy tool to report storage returns from deduplication and thin-provisioning, as well as various breakdowns of storage utilization. Efficiency Dashboard is installed as a script into the DataFabric Manager and can be accessed at this URL: http://um-server-hname:8080/dashboard.html.

Here is an example of the Efficiency Dashboard report (click to enlarge):

Storage Utilization shows Total/Used capacity. Raw Capacity Breakdown has more detailed utilization figures, such as Fixed Reserve (amount of space reserved for Kernel, WAFL Reserve, Checksums, etc). You can quickly find out from the Unused Reserve Capacity section if you have any volumes or LUNs left thick-provisioned. Storage Efficiency and Efficiency Return Breakdowns have detailed info on various storage efficiency returns, such as deduplication, thin-provisioning, RAID-DP, etc.

If you need to present a colourful report of thin-provisioning and deduplication returns to the customer, then I recommend to try this tool.

Exporting Performance Data from NetApp DataFabric Manager

Quick post on how to export custom data from DataFabric Manager Performance Advisor.

NetApp Management Console gives a convenient access to the Performance Advisor data and graphs for a comprehensive analysis of NetApp performance. But NMC only shows graphs and doesn’t give access to the exact numbers. But there is a way to export them for further analysis from the dfm cli:

> dfm perf data retrieve -o filer_name -C disk:disk_busy -b “2013-05-23 12:00:00” -e “2013-05-23 17:00:00” -s 3600 -x TimeIndexed > C:\Temp\dfm_export.txt

Default sample rate for the performance data is 15 minutes. It means that you will get 20 lines of data for a 5 hour period. You can specify the data sample rate in seconds by using ‘-s’ key. Particular performance counter is specified by ‘-C’ key. To list all the available counters run:

> dfm perf export counter list

Data is exported in a list format, if you want it to look more like a spreadsheet, use ‘-x TimeIndexed’. And that’s all for now.