6

We have a number of filesystems for our computational cluster, with a lot of users that store a lot of really large files. We'd like to monitor the filesystem and help optimize their usage of it, as well as plan for expansion.

In order to this, we need some way to monitor how these filesystems are used. Essentially I'd like to know all sorts of statistics about the files:

  • Age
  • Frequency of access
  • Last accessed times
  • Types
  • Sizes

Ideally this information would be available in aggregate form for any directory so that we could monitor it based on project or user.

Short of writing something up myself in Python, I haven't been able to find any tools capable of performing these duties. Any recommendations?

ewwhite
  • 201,205
Kamil Kisiel
  • 12,444

3 Answers3

1

You probably want something that will log file system events with inotify. Maybe something like logsend. Also see inotify-tools.

Kyle Brandt
  • 85,693
1

Wow. Novell has something a lot like this for their Open Enterprise Server on NSS volumes that gives most of that. Not frequency of access, that's proxied by last-access-date, but definitely the rest of it. It's a Java processes that crawls the volume tree to build what they call an Inventory. I'm pretty sure it isn't open sourced, but that report is rather nice to have.

sysadmin1138
  • 135,853
-1

I'd go the python way. os.walk() is easy to use, and all the info you need for each file is in the stat().

Javier
  • 9,486