Ask Slashdot: Smarter Disk Space Monitoring In the Age of Cheap Storage?

relliker writes In the olden days, when monitoring a file system of a few 100 MB, we would be alerted when it topped 90% or more, with 95% a lot of times considered quite critical. Today, however, with a lot of file systems in the Terabyte range, a 90-95% full file system can still have a considerable amount of free space but we still mostly get bugged by the same alerts as in the days of yore when there really isn't a cause for immediate concern. Apart from increasing thresholds and/or starting to monitor actual free space left instead of a percentage, should it be time for monitoring systems to become a bit more intelligent by taking space usage trends and heuristics into account too and only warn about critical usage when projected thresholds are exceeded? I'd like my system to warn me with something like, 'Hey!, you'll be running out of space in a couple of months if you go on like this!' Or is this already the norm and I'm still living in a digital cave? What do you use, on what operating system?

Comments

Re:Performance issues?

[Anne Thwacks]

If you use Unix on a server, you should have multiple partitions. If you don't know that, you should not be using Unix. If you have a server, and you are not using Unix, you should not be in charge of a server. The partitions might be on different H/Ds if performance matters. Different partitions get used in different ways. Some grow faster than others.

If any partition is more than 50% full, you had best have a plan for what to do next, even if it will not need to be done for two years. If you don't plan two years ahead, you should not be running a server. If you use SCSI disks on Unix, its easy to add more hard disks. If you are not using SCSI hard disks, well, presumably the data was not very important anyway.

Did I mention the lawn?