Better ZFS statistics reporting would be nice

[jgreco]

In trying to determine how to improve the performance of one of our FreeNAS servers here, I was trying to understand where it was most hurting.

The lack of perl makes it hard to run tools such as arc_summary.pl. Could similar tools be made part of FreeNAS in python? The current tools for reporting on a FreeNAS system are nice, probably better than a lot of things, but they're rather trite if you're trying to reconcile performance information with ZFS tuning tips to determine whether to invest in SSD's, etc.

As a longtime sysadmin, I'm used to having to invest the time and effort to dredge through all this stuff to get the answers I need, but it seems to me the point of FreeNAS is that average users shouldn't have to do all that.

[william]

Well, a quick look at arc_summary.pl tells me it is a script made for Solaris (uses a perl library from Solaris) so I wouldn't run even if there were perl packages. I don't know if you got a ported version for freebsd.

However porting this script to python is trivial...

All the arc stats can be retrieve via sysctl...
e.g. sysctl kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats

[jgreco]

As with ZFS itself, important ZFS tools are typically ported to FreeBSD, as FreeBSD is the primary other OS that has decent support for ZFS. See for example, ​http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide to find a pointer to some FreeBSD stats tools for ZFS. I believe there's another page out there with some other lesser tools as well, but I am not finding it at the moment.

[gcooper]

jhixson added support in r9566 (and beyond!). Initial support was added to 8.0.4-RELEASE.