One of the things that many DBAs struggle with is managing space across an estate. There might be one or two servers that you watch closely, or that are a constant problem, but it’s easy to run out of space on other systems.
Redgate Monitor will alert you to low space, but do you want to keep asking SAN admins for more space every week as new systems run out of space? Or do you want to project a number for the year and get that budgeted? Learn how Redgate Monitor can help
This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts
An Estate View of Storage
The estate view of disk usage shows all your disks totaled up and the projections for growth. This looks like the image below on monitor.red-gate.com. This doesn’t seem useful, but I’ve had storage admins come to me in the past asking about budgeting for the next year. How much space will I use?
The answer is often I don’t know. I’d have to take a very wild guess for them. Now, I’d use this, and maybe pad it slightly, but across lots of systems, we can probably guess on the growth that will be needed. Any one system might not be predictable, but across lots, averages work out.
Here I can see we’re using 25TB (out of 87TB). Definitely be careful showing this to storage admins, as they often want those to be closer, ubt I can see I’m projected to use 91TB in a year, so I’d need more space. The graph above shows me running out of space in Sept/Oct of 2025.
Below this I see details from machines and their disks. These show in the same groups I see on other screens. While I can’t easily filter here, I can search from a browser, or export this information. That’s useful for checking on individual systems.
The other nice thing is I can sort the columns, and if I do this by time until full, I can see the disks that might give me problems soon.
None of the test systems are likely to be problematic soon, but certainly someone needs to budget for next year.
Summary
This is a simple screen, but one that I wish I’d have had in the past. It gives me a lot of information that I rarely need, but information that always requires a lot of effort to compile. What disks are being used by my database servers and what percentage of space is in use.
In a DBA team, this is the type of data I’d want to glance at every quarter and then make adjustments to prevents issues. Proactive DBAs want a screen just like this.
Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.