Monitoring IFS directory growth

Robot/SPACE lets you view actual directory sizes

You recently added another new application to your IBM System i (AS/400, iSeries) that uses IFS directories to store data. You already had Domino information in the IFS, not to mention Client Access data. The IFS area continues to evolve and take up more and more of your disk space. Now, the big question is this: Do you have the tools needed to monitor and track the growth of IFS directories on your system?

Many of the tools we typically use to track disk space look only at overall disk space consumption or only at space used by libraries. However, disk space consumption on this platform has changed considerably. IBM continues to put more and more applications into System i directories, and every time you install IBM software such as Domino, WebSphere, and Client Access, there are remnants left over in the IFS. What if you use SAP or EnterpriseOne on a System i? They also store data in the IFS. In fact, any product that converts spooled files to PDF puts the PDF conversions in this area.

Figure 1: Robot/SPACE Collection Explorer

It’s actually very easy to look at the IFS. Just use the WRKLNK command to see the directories on your system. The command also displays libraries and the old folder system (called QDOC). However, you don’t have to worry about managing these two file systems; your old methods still work fine.

Your current system administration team doesn’t have the time to write programs that use APIs to automate monitoring and collecting in the IFS. So, they often resort to guessing on consumption.

To monitor IFS growth, we recommend Robot/SPACE. The easy-to-use Robot/SPACE Explorer allows you to open all your directories. From the Explorer, you can view actual directory sizes, establish rules that define which directories you want to see, compare two different collections to see what has changed from a prior collection, and report on directory growth (Figure 1). Then, you can specify an action to take if a directory exceeds the defined threshold level, based on growth percentage or size.

Collection Groups allow you to define which directories to collect and how to group them so you can report on who is responsible for them (Figure 2). They’ll also warn you about excessive growth. Robot/SPACE even has a cleanup routine for purging old IFS objects from the system.

Figure 2: Define the rules for collecting IFS directories.

Finding files in the IFS
Can you find the largest files in your IFS? After Robot/SPACE has completed a collection on a directory, you can use Robot/QUERY to build a list of the top files across all your IFS directories, or you can drill into a directory and see the files it contains (Figure 3). This gives you a nice list of objects to watch—or even remove from the system. In addition, you can copy and paste data from the Robot/SPACE Explorer into your favorite spreadsheet application.

Figure 3: Drill down from directory to IFS stream files.

Robot/SPACE provides a great insight into the IFS. Give it a free 30-day trial.

Contributed by Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services