Protocol: SFTP Bytes

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This statistic shows SFTP bytes/sec requested by clients to the appliance. Various useful breakdowns are available: to show the client, user and filename of the SFTP requests.

Example

See Protocol: FTP Bytes for an example of a similar statistic with similar breakdowns.

When to Check SFTP Bytes

SFTP bytes/sec can be used as an indication of SFTP load, and can be viewed on the dashboard.

The best way to improve performance is to eliminate unnecessary work, which may be identified through the client, user and filename breakdowns, and the filename hierarchy view. It may be best to enable these breakdowns for short periods only: the by-filename breakdown can be one of the most expensive in terms of storage and execution overhead, and may not be suitable to leave enabled permanently on appliances with high rates of SFTP activity.

SFTP Bytes Breakdowns

Table 47 Breakdowns of SFTP Bytes

Breakdown	Description
type of operation	SFTP operation type (get/put/...)
user	Username of the client
filename	Filename for the SFTP operation, if known and cached by the appliance. If the filename is not known it is reported as "<unknown>".
share	The share for this SFTP request.
project	The project for this SFTP request.
client	Remote hostname or IP address of the SFTP client.

These breakdowns can be combined to produce powerful statistics. For example, use "Protocol: SFTP bytes per second for client hostname.example.com broken down by filename" to view which files a particular client is accessing.

Further Analysis

See Cache: ARC Accesses to learn how well an SFTP read workload is returning from cache; and Disk: I/O Operations for the back-end disk I/O caused.

Since SFTP uses SSH to encrypt FTP, there will be additional CPU overhead for this protocol. To check overall CPU utilization of the appliance, see CPU: Percent Utilization.