Improved reporting in web interface

[noprobs]

I am reasonably new to FreeNAS having investigated it (and other storage software) many times but only moved into production in the last month. Whilst I am happy with my new choice I have noticed that reporting is very basic (compared to others eg NexentaStor). If I go to the CLI then I can get plenty of real-time data but I would prefer not to have to go to command line and I would also like historical trending.

As an example here is a list of reports I would like to see available - if a developer is interested in progressing then happy to write a more definite requirements statement

- zpool - operations/bandwidth
- zpool - compressions benefits
- Disk utilisation
- Arc utilisation and optimisation
- Traffic per share point/per protocol


Thanks,

Jon

 

[cyberjock]

Some of what you are asking for may not be available to display. In particular, traffic per share point per protocol. The different protocols are separate services and I'm not sure if they log that info anywhere.

As for the ARC utilization, it should slowly go up until it hits 100%. It's designed to use as much as it can.

Disk utilization you get in the nightly emails if you have that setup.

Compression benefits may be included with the nightly email. I'm not sure since I've never used compression.

Can you elaborate on operations and bandwidth? The first screen shows you a graphical representation of traffic in and out on all of the ethernet interfaces. Not sure what else you would want.

 

[noprobs]

Thanks for quick reply. Of course all of this info it to help determine if everything is running optimally and whether further improvements are justified

I am not familiar on internal logging to know what is avail but I do know Nexentastor gives excellent reports on NFS, CIFS etc throughput et al

For ARC I was looking at arc_summary.py and arcstat.py which gives information about size and efficiency of arc.

Disk utilisation -sorry wrong word. I was looking at output of zpool iostat and iostat -xd. What is throughput/operations to each zpool, dataset and how hard are each disk working

Compressions is not included in nightly email - just dedupe (which personally I dont use). I obtain details with zfs get compressratio zpool/dataset

Of course the one I really one is latency. But I am not sure how to obtain even from CLI - I like the nice graphs from NetApp though

Late Add: Also need for historical data to be stored (on USB of NFS export) so no data lost on reboot (as I just found out)

Happy to elaborate further if it would help others.

Cheers,

Jon

 

[cyberjock]

Latency can be monitored with iostat -o. Unfortunately it is a per-device and not per-zpool. I'm not aware of any tool that will give you latency on a per-zpool basis, but I'm fairly noobish regarding FreeBSD command line.

 

[noprobs]

Something else to add to the reporting wish list - progress report on replication.

Suggestion: List of replication jobs in progress/queued showing amount to replication and amount completed eg

Active Vol1/VM@auto-20121220.2300-1w 1.5/10.0 (GB)
Waiting Vol2/VM@auto-20121220.2300-1w 0/4.5 (GB)


I have had a look round but could not find anything on CLI to provide this - so not sure if poss?

Cheers,

Jon

 

[cyberjock]

AFAIK there is no way to determine the progress of ZFS replication.

 

[Stephens]

Some of the requests are made in the absence of an understanding that FreeNAS basicalloy is a package of scripts that sits on top of FreeBSD (nanoBSD) and that it does not rewrite the functionality of the underlying OS.

So just to clarify, what noobsauce80 is saying would seem to say, "There's no way to determine progress of ZFS replication in FreeNAS," which might tempt noprobs to think, "I know that! That's why I'm requesting it!" But what noobsauce said is while FreeNAS provides a GUI front-end for kicking off replication, the actual replication code is part of FreeBSD, and if that code doesn't report on the status of the replication, FreeNAS can't capture the status for GUI presentation.

 

[maurertodd]

Perhaps said a different way...the request is valid, but the requestor is asking for the enhancement in the wrong place. FreeNAS uses what is given by FreeBSD and the implementation of ZFS. The enhancement request may need to proceded like this:

Request of ZFS team to add the functionality to see progress.

Request of FreeBSD team to implement the enhanced ZFS.

Request of the FreeNAS team to make that information visible in the GUI.

 

[noprobs]

Thanks for responses and clarifications.

Yes I am aware that FreeNAS is effectively a GUI on top of FreeBSD 8.3. My initial request was all about making what is available on CLI easier to consume ie via the GUI. My subsequent Q was about ZFS send/receive progress (having just initiated an initial seed) and I wasn't aware what is/is not possible. I have however done some digging and indeed current versions of ZFS do not provide this; however I read a presentation from Nexenta (who appear to have recruited numerous Sun engineers) which suggest that this has been added into the code (but not yet released). When/If it finally makes it into a public release of ZFS and then into FreeBSD I hope FreeNAS picks it up. :)

Cheers,

Jon

 

[cyberjock]

Sounds like we might see it someday :)