Observing and Monitoring ZFS Metrics Using Open Source Tools

Talk by Richard Elling at OpenZFS Developer Summit 2018:

Observing and Monitoring ZFS Metrics Using Open Source Tools

With its roots in Solaris, ZFS has always had a plethora of metrics available via the kstat interface. These raw metrics are unwieldy, so a number of tools have been developed to make them more usable by humans, including arcsummary, arcstats, et.al. But even these command line tools are tedious to use and not at all useful for long-term data collection.

In this talk, we'll examine a number of ZFS metric collectors that can feed time-series databases for long-term collection and analysis. We will also look at dashboards that graphically display metrics data so trends can be understood. We will also take a look at monitoring tools that can automatically raise alerts when problems occur. All of this is readily available leveraging existing open source projects.