Monitoring ZFS File System Practices
You should monitor your ZFS file systems to ensure they are available and to identify space consumption issues.
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Weekly, monitor file system space availability with the
zpool list
andzfs list
commands rather than thedu
anddf
commands because legacy commands do not account for space that is consumed by descendant file systems or snapshots.For more information, see Resolving ZFS Space Issues.
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Display file system space consumption by using the
zfs list -o space
command. -
File system space can be unknowingly consumed by snapshots. You can display all dataset information by using the following syntax:
$ zfs list -t all
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A separate
/var
file system is created automatically when a system is installed, but you should set a quota and reservation on this file system to ensure that it does not unknowingly consume root pool space. -
In addition, you can use the
fsstat
command to display file operation activity of ZFS file systems. Activity can be reported by mount point or by file system type. The following example shows general ZFS file system activity:$ fsstat / new name name attr attr lookup rddir read read write write file remov chng get set ops ops ops bytes ops bytes 832 589 286 837K 3.23K 2.62M 20.8K 1.15M 1.75G 62.5K 348M /
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Backups
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Keep file system snapshots
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Consider enterprise-level software for weekly and monthly backups
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Store root pool snapshots on a remote system for bare metal recovery
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