Monitoring ZFS File System Practices

You should monitor your ZFS file systems to ensure they are available and to identify space consumption issues.

Weekly, monitor file system space availability with the zpool list and zfs list commands rather than the du and df 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.
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
```
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 /
```
Backups
- Keep file system snapshots
- Consider enterprise-level software for weekly and monthly backups
- Store root pool snapshots on a remote system for bare metal recovery