stor-age

Show aging of directories.

Table of Contents

• Motivation
• Usage
• Features
• Installation
  • Arch Linux
  • cargo install
  • from source

Motivation

The main motivation of this tool is to find out, for a given set of data directories, how much of the storage capacity is still in active use. This information can be used on data processing systems, like High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters, to motivate users to migrate their unused data to long-term storage facilities.

The file system metadata available for this analysis are the access time and the modification time of the files in the data directory. Using this metadata and given a set of ages, the percentage of accessed and modified capacity of the total can be calculated for each of these ages and directories. Doing this over time, a usage profile of the data directories can be created. Users can be shown, when their data on the system gets stale and should be migrated to a storage facility suited for long-term archival.

Usage

Interactive

Show how much of your directories have been lying around unused:

$ stor-age 90 365 -- ~/media/pics ~/projects

Directory             Age Bytes     Accessed  Percent Modified  Percent Files Accessed Percent Modified Percent
/home/user/projects    90   5.8 GiB   5.7 GiB   97.8%   5.6 GiB  95.12% 72596    71582   98.6%    39914  54.98%
                      365             5.8 GiB  98.85%   5.6 GiB  96.38%          71981  99.15%    48734  67.13%
/home/user/media/pics  90 483.2 MiB 107.0 MiB  22.15% 488.7 kiB    0.1%  2299      328  14.27%        7    0.3%
                      365           219.1 MiB  45.35%   3.0 MiB   0.63%           2119  92.17%       13   0.57%

Note: The two dashes -- are required because you can supply both multiple ages and mulitple directories and the command-line argument parser needs a way to distinguish these two lists.

Metrics for Monitoring Systems

Iterate over a set of directories with find-like tools:

find /data/ -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d |
  stor-age --format prometheus 90 365

The output is in valid Prometheus metric exposition format:

# HELP stor_age_bytes_total Total size in bytes.
# TYPE stor_age_bytes_total gauge
stor_age_bytes_total{dir="/data/foo"} 132904506033
stor_age_bytes_total{dir="/data/bar"} 52451763095
stor_age_bytes_total{dir="/data/baz"} 38525158426

# HELP stor_age_bytes_accessed Accessed size in bytes.
# TYPE stor_age_bytes_accessed gauge
stor_age_bytes_accessed{dir="/data/foo",age="90"} 770700907
stor_age_bytes_accessed{dir="/data/foo",age="365"} 8013210318
stor_age_bytes_accessed{dir="/data/bar",age="90"} 1003231299
stor_age_bytes_accessed{dir="/data/bar",age="365"} 27936338982
stor_age_bytes_accessed{dir="/data/baz",age="90"} 4534759665
stor_age_bytes_accessed{dir="/data/baz",age="365"} 38525158426

# HELP stor_age_bytes_modified Modified size in bytes.
# TYPE stor_age_bytes_modified gauge
stor_age_bytes_modified{dir="/data/foo",age="90"} 3309
stor_age_bytes_modified{dir="/data/foo",age="365"} 8013127399
stor_age_bytes_modified{dir="/data/bar",age="90"} 964846566
stor_age_bytes_modified{dir="/data/bar",age="365"} 4738171482
stor_age_bytes_modified{dir="/data/baz",age="90"} 3641814237
stor_age_bytes_modified{dir="/data/baz",age="365"} 13704189585

# HELP stor_age_files_total Total number of files.
# TYPE stor_age_files_total gauge
stor_age_files_total{dir="/data/foo"} 1913
stor_age_files_total{dir="/data/bar"} 1516
stor_age_files_total{dir="/data/baz"} 2023

# HELP stor_age_files_accessed Accessed number of files.
# TYPE stor_age_files_accessed gauge
stor_age_files_accessed{dir="/data/foo",age="90"} 11
stor_age_files_accessed{dir="/data/foo",age="365"} 262
stor_age_files_accessed{dir="/data/bar",age="90"} 553
stor_age_files_accessed{dir="/data/bar",age="365"} 1402
stor_age_files_accessed{dir="/data/baz",age="90"} 711
stor_age_files_accessed{dir="/data/baz",age="365"} 2023

# HELP stor_age_files_modified Modified number of files.
# TYPE stor_age_files_modified gauge
stor_age_files_modified{dir="/data/foo",age="90"} 2
stor_age_files_modified{dir="/data/foo",age="365"} 250
stor_age_files_modified{dir="/data/bar",age="90"} 553
stor_age_files_modified{dir="/data/bar",age="365"} 1339
stor_age_files_modified{dir="/data/baz",age="90"} 558
stor_age_files_modified{dir="/data/baz",age="365"} 1894

Features

The following list contains the crate features to be enabled via e.g. cargo build --feature <FEATURES>. The list contains whether or not the feature is enabled by default and what the rationale of this feature is.

• table (default)

  Adds an output format, i.e. --format table, that pretty-prints the report as a table. This is intended for interactive command-line usage. It is the default output format if this feature is enabled.

  If you only need the output formats that are useful to be included as metrics in monitoring systems (e.g. --format prometheus), you can disable this feature to minimize dependencies.

• spectrum-scale

  Adds an optional file system iteration mode specific to IBM Spectrum Scale file systems. This iteration mode uses the mmapplypolicy command instead of universal directory traversal (std::fs::read_dir).

  This can be considerably faster, especially for large directories, because it uses file system internals and can use extensive parallelism. See the respective command-line options in --help output for more information.

  Note: The policies used with mmapplypolicy write temporary lists of files to plain text files. These can get quite large, scaling with the amount of files. Depending on where these lists are kept, you will either need large amounts of memory (tmpfs) or disk space, approximately 150 MiB per million files.

Installation

Arch Linux

Install the stor-age AUR package:

pacaur -S stor-age

cargo install

cargo install stor-age

from source

git clone https://github.com/idiv-biodiversity/stor-age.git
cd stor-age
cargo build --release
install -Dm755 target/release/stor-age ~/bin/stor-age