Monitoring instances and quota

This page shows you how to monitor your Filestore instances and set up alerts for low disk space and low backups quota.

You can monitor Filestore instances using Cloud Monitoring.

Before you begin

Before you begin, make sure you have access to the following roles:

  • Monitoring Viewer
  • Monitoring Editor

To see how to grant access to these roles, see Grant access to Cloud Monitoring.

Add a Filestore metric chart to a Cloud Monitoring dashboard

To see Filestore performance metrics in a Cloud Monitoring dashboard, follow these steps:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the  Metrics explorer page:

    Go to Metrics explorer

    If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

  2. Click the Select a metric expandable section.
  3. In the Filter by resource or metric name field, type filestore and select the Filestore Instance expandable section.

  4. Select an available metric to view:

    Metric Description Basic Tiers Regional, Enterprise, and Zonal Tiers
    Average read latency The average time a read operation takes (in milliseconds). ✓
    Average write latency The average time a write operation takes (in milliseconds). ✓
    Bytes written Number of bytes written. ✓ ✓
    Bytes read Number of bytes read from persistent storage. This can be less than the number of bytes read by clients, as some reads might be served from a memory cache. * ✓ ✓
    Disk read operation count Number of disk read operations. If the Filestore instance caches the data, some read operations are not reflected as disk reads. * ✓ ✓
    Disk write operation count Number of disk write operations. If the Filestore instance caches the data, some write operations are not reflected as disk writes. * ✓ ✓
    Metadata operations count Number of disk metadata operations. ✓
    Free bytes Number of free disk bytes. ✓ ✓
    Free disk space percent Percentage of free disk bytes. ✓ ✓
    Free raw capacity percent Free raw capacity as a percentage of total space. ✓
    Procedure call count Returns the same information as the nfsstat -s command. ✓
    Snapshots used bytes The amount of space used for storing snapshots, measured in bytes. ✓ ✓
    Time (in milliseconds) spent on read operations Time spent on disk reads. ✓
    Time (in milliseconds) spent on write operations Time spent on disk writes. ✓
    Used bytes Number of used disk bytes. ✓ ✓
    Used space percent Percentage of used disk bytes. ✓ ✓

    *Memory-cached operations only occur in Basic tier instances.

  5. Optional configurations:

    Field Description
    Filter Filter to the Filestore instances that you want to monitor.
    Group by Combining data from similar time series.
    Aggregator Combine time series using common functions.
    Minimum alignment period The time interval for which aggregation takes place.

  6. If you want to add more metrics to the chart, click Add another metric.

  7. Click Save Chart to create a dashboard. Alternatively, you can add the chart to an existing dashboard.

Metric definitions

The following sections describe certain Filestore-specific metrics in detail.

Free raw capacity percent

The free raw capacity percent metric represents capacity available to users, not necessarily the available raw disk space.

Your instance replicates data to provide durability and to help support performance, resulting in a total storage capacity greater than the user-specified capacity of the instance.

The free raw capacity percent metric represents the percentage of free raw capacity available to users after any replication performed as a function of instance durability or performance.

If this metric reaches 0%, new data cannot be written to the cluster until more free space becomes available.

For more information on how to scale instance capacity up or down, see Scale capacity.

Snapshots used bytes

The snapshots used bytes metric represents the number of bytes in use by all snapshots, whether internal or external. This metric is allocated and indexed by share, not instance.

Used bytes

The used bytes metric represents the raw data written by the user. It doesn't take into account the space required for inodes and metadata.

Anticipating capacity

For a better understanding of an instance's available capacity, we recommend monitoring the available space as well as the written space.

To see the free space on an instance, use the free raw capacity percent metric.

Each file stored on the file share consumes one inode. If the file system runs out of inodes, you won't be able to store more files on the file share even if you haven't reached the maximum allocated capacity.

To see the number of inodes in use, use the df command. For more information, see Scale capacity and Troubleshoot capacity issues.

Set up alerts

Low disk space

To ensure that your Filestore instances don't run out of free space, we recommend setting up low disk space alerts. This guide uses the free disk space percent metric to measure the free disc space for basic instances.

If you want to measure low disk space for zonal, regional, or enterprise instances, use the following steps to set up two separate alerts using free disk space percent and free raw capacity percent metrics.

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the  Alerting page:

    Go to Alerting

    If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

  2. Click Create Policy.
  3. Click the Select a metric expandable section.
  4. In the Filter by resource or metric name field, type filestore and select the Filestore Instance expandable section.
  5. Select the Nfs active metric category.
  6. Select the metric Free disk space percent.
  7. Click Apply.
  8. In the Add filters section, click Add a filter.
  9. Click the Filter expandable section and select instance_name.
  10. In the Value field, enter the Filestore instance name for which you want to receive alerts.

  11. Click Done.

    For more information about filtering Cloud Monitoring metrics, see Filtering.

  12. In the Transform data section, specify the Rolling window and Rolling window function. Indicate whether you want to include a secondary data transformation and click Next.

  13. In the Configure alert trigger window, choose a condition type.

  14. Set the following specifications:

    Field Configuration
    Alert trigger Any time series violates
    Threshold position Below threshold
    Threshold value Enter the lowest acceptable free disk space percentage for each of your Filestore instances.

    You can test the alert by setting a low limit and seeing whether the alert gets triggered.

    For more information, see Default create alerting policy flow.

  15. Enter any advanced options.

  16. In the Condition name field, enter a name for the condition.

  17. Click Next.

  18. In the Configure notifications and finalize alert window, indicate which notification channels you want to use.

    For information on how to create new channels, see Manage notification channels.

  19. In the Incident autoclose duration menu, select the duration you want to use.

  20. In the Policy user labels section, indicate the labels you want to use.

  21. In the Documentation section, add any documentation you want to include such as instructions on how to address the issue.

  22. In the Alert policy name field, enter an alert policy name and click Next.

  23. Click Create policy.

Low backups quota

If you are scheduling or automating backups creation for your Filestore instances, you should set up alerts for when you're running low on backups quota.

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the  Alerting page:

    Go to Alerting

    If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

  2. Click Create Policy.
  3. Click the Select a metric expandable section.
  4. In the Filter by resource or metric name field, type quota and select the Consumer quota expandable section.
  5. Select the Quota active metric category.
  6. Select the metric Allocation quota usage.
  7. Click Apply.
  8. In the Add filters section, click Add Filter.
  9. Click the Filter expandable section and select quota_metric.
  10. In the Value field, enter file.googleapis.com/backups-per-region.
  11. Click Done.

  12. Optional: To add another filter, click Add filter and repeat the process.

    For more information about filtering Cloud Monitoring metrics, see Filtering.

  13. In the Transform data section, specify the Rolling window and Rolling window function. Indicate whether you want to include a secondary data transformation and click Next.

  14. In the Configure alert trigger window, choose a condition type.

  15. Set the following specifications:

    Field Configuration
    Alert trigger Any time series violates
    Threshold position Below threshold
    Threshold value Enter the lowest acceptable backups quota remaining.

    You can test the alert by setting a low limit and seeing whether the alert gets triggered.

    For more information, see Default create alerting policy flow.

  16. Enter any advanced options.

  17. In the Condition name field, enter a name for the condition.

  18. Click Next.

  19. In the Configure notifications and finalize alert window, indicate which notification channels you want to use.

    For information on how to create new channels, see Manage notification channels.

  20. In the Incident autoclose duration menu, select the duration you want to use.

  21. In the Policy user labels section, indicate the labels you want to use.

  22. In the Documentation section, add any documentation you want to include such as instructions on how to address the issue, for example, "Delete older backups" or "Request additional quota".

  23. In the Alert policy name field, enter an alert policy name and click Next.

  24. Click Create policy.

What's next