The Blog of Jorge de la Cruz

Everything about VMware, Veeam, InfluxData, Grafana, Zimbra, etc.

Looking for the Perfect Dashboard: InfluxDB, Telegraf and Grafana – Part XXVII (Monitoring ReFS and XFS (block-cloning and reflink)

- Written in: veeam

Greetings friends, a new week is a week with a new dashboard, this is so, I would like to be able to offer you many more use cases, with many other technologies, but time is very limited and I only have some nights to prepare this.

Today we are going to see a topic that I have heard for at least 5 years, I mean to know and to know the amount of disk that we are using and saving, when we make use of technologies like ReFS, or XFS, together with Veeam Backup & Replication.

Once you have finished this tutorial, you will have something similar to this, it is better to give it several days or weeks to see the full potential:

A brief reminder about ReFS and XFS with Veeam Backup & Replication

I know you all read me when I publish, but just in case you missed one of these two entries, they are necessary for this Dashboard to work of course. We will have to have backups, with synthetic backups activated, going to a ReFS or XFS repository, I leave you the step by step here:

Diagram of REFS/XFS, InfluxDB and Grafana monitoring disk usage in Veeam Backup Repositories

Although I have already shown you in some occasions the diagram of how would be the monitoring using Grafana and InfluxDB, I leave you again the diagram, this time monitoring the backups in ReFS/XFS repositories:

Download, and configure the  veeam_refs_savings.ps1 script

First of all, we will have to download the magnificent blockstat.exe by Timothy Dewin, once downloaded, we put it in a folder and mark it as safe.

We will download the script that will make all this work in Microsoft Windows ReFS environments, we will download the latest version from the Github repository:

This PowerShell script has to be run from the Veeam Backup Repository where ReFS is enabled. We’ll have to edit the configuration parameters:

##
# Configurations
##
# Logical Volume with ReFS enabled
$dir = "T:\"
# Path to the blockstat.exe and for the output path
$exe = "C:\blockstat\blockstat.exe"
$listfilepath = "C:\blockstat\in.txt"
$outputpath = "C:\blockstat\out.xml"
$type="ReFS"

# Endpoint URL for InfluxDB
$veeamInfluxDBURL="http://YOURINFLUXSERVERIP" #Your InfluxDB Server, http://FQDN or https://FQDN if using SSL
$veeamInfluxDBPort="8086" #Default Port
$veeamInfluxDB="telegraf" #Default Database
$veeamInfluxDBUser="USER" #User for Database
$veeamInfluxDBPassword='PASSWORD' | ConvertTo-SecureString -asPlainText -Force

How to schedule the PowerShell script every 24 hours

I suppose that you want to know every day the disk consumption, as well as how much space you are saving using ReFS, etc. with what I am going to teach you how to create a programmed task every 24 hours.

Please select a name for your scheduled task, this is the one I’ve chosen: In the triggers, we’ll select that we want to run it every 24 hours:  In the actions, in program/script, we will select where we have Powershell, by default you can see the folder here, also in arguments we will select the path with the script included, and finally, in start in, we will select the folder: Let’s run it and see what happens:If we want to check very quickly that we already have information on InfluxDB, we can go to Grafana Explore and search within the table veeam_fastclone_stats:

Download, and configure the veeam_xfs_savings.sh script

Let’s download the script that will make all this work, we will download the latest version from the Github repository:

This shell script must be run from the server where we have the XFS volume. We will have to edit the configuration parameters:

##
# Configurations
##
# Endpoint URL for InfluxDB
veeamInfluxDBURL="http://YOURINFLUXSERVERIP" #Your InfluxDB Server, http://FQDN or https://FQDN if using SSL
veeamInfluxDBPort="8086" #Default Port
veeamInfluxDB="telegraf" #Default Database
veeamInfluxDBUser="USER" #User for Database
veeamInfluxDBPassword='PASSWORD' #Password for Database
veeamXFSMount="/backups/" #Your XFS mount point
veeamRepoName="VEEAM-XFS-001" #Your XFS Repo Name in Veeam Backup & Replication Server
type="XFS"

Let’s make the script executable:

chmod +x veeam_xfs_savings.sh

We will make sure we have jq installed, an apt-get install jq or yum install jq if we use CentOS:

sudo apt-get install jq

Let’s run it as per usual ./veeam_xfs_savings.sh if everything went alright, we will she the next output:

Writing veeam_xfs_savings to InfluxDB
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Content-Type: application/json
Request-Id: 98793b48-e51b-11ea-8307-dca632b112f7
X-Influxdb-Build: OSS
X-Influxdb-Version: 1.8.2
X-Request-Id: 98793b48-e51b-11ea-8307-dca632b112f7
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2020 08:35:27 GMT

Writing veeam_xfs_savings to InfluxDB
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Content-Type: application/json
Request-Id: 9887b0af-e51b-11ea-8308-dca632b112f7
X-Influxdb-Build: OSS
X-Influxdb-Version: 1.8.2
X-Request-Id: 9887b0af-e51b-11ea-8308-dca632b112f7
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2020 08:35:27 GMT

Also, it would be nice to put it in the cron to run every 24 hours:

crontab -e
0 3 * * * /home/oper/veeam_xfs_savings.sh >> /var/log/veeam_xfs_savings.log 2>&1

That’s all for now, let’s move to the next step.

Grafana Dashboards

I created a Dashboard from scratch by selecting the best requests to the database, finishing off colors, thinking about graphics, and how to display them, and everything is automated so that it fits our environment without any problem and without having to edit anything manually. The Dashboard can be found here, once imported, you can see all the graphics:

How to easily Import the Grafana Dashboard

So that you don’t have to waste hours configuring a new dashboard, and ingesting and debugging you want, I have already created four wonderful dashboards with everything necessary to monitor our environment in a very simple way, it will look like the image I showed you above.Select the name you want and enter the ID: 12881, which is the unique ID of the Dashboard, or the URL:

We’ll have everything popping up without any problem:I hope you like it, and I would like to leave you the complete series here, so you can start playing with the plugins that I have been telling you about all these years:

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ollie says

    Hi Jorge, for larger environments it would be nice to have the hostname included as well!
    Thanks for this great dash!

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