Device Management¶

Ceph tracks which hardware storage devices (e.g., HDDs, SSDs) are consumed by which daemons, and collects health metrics about those devices in order to provide tools to predict and/or automatically respond to hardware failure.

Device tracking¶

You can query which storage devices are in use with:

ceph device ls

You can also list devices by daemon or by host:

ceph device ls-by-daemon <daemon>
ceph device ls-by-host <host>

For any individual device, you can query information about its location and how it is being consumed with:

ceph device info <devid>

Enabling monitoring¶

Ceph can also monitor health metrics associated with your device. For example, SATA hard disks implement a standard called SMART that provides a wide range of internal metrics about the device’s usage and health, like the number of hours powered on, number of power cycles, or unrecoverable read errors. Other device types like SAS and NVMe implement a similar set of metrics (via slightly different standards). All of these can be collected by Ceph via the smartctl tool.

You can enable or disable health monitoring with:

ceph device monitoring on

or:

ceph device monitoring off

Scraping¶

If monitoring is enabled, metrics will automatically be scraped at regular intervals. That interval can be configured with:

ceph config set mgr mgr/devicehealth/scrape_frequency <seconds>

The default is to scrape once every 24 hours.

You can manually trigger a scrape of all devices with:

ceph device scrape-health-metrics

A single device can be scraped with:

ceph device scrape-health-metrics <device-id>

Or a single daemon’s devices can be scraped with:

ceph device scrape-daemon-health-metrics <who>

The stored health metrics for a device can be retrieved (optionally for a specific timestamp) with:

ceph device get-health-metrics <devid> [sample-timestamp]

Failure prediction¶

Ceph can predict life expectancy and device failures based on the health metrics it collects. There are three modes:

none: disable device failure prediction.
local: use a pre-trained prediction model from the ceph-mgr daemon
cloud: share device health and performance metrics an external cloud service run by ProphetStor, using either their free service or a paid service with more accurate predictions

The prediction mode can be configured with:

ceph config set global device_failure_prediction_mode <mode>

Prediction normally runs in the background on a periodic basis, so it may take some time before life expectancy values are populated. You can see the life expectancy of all devices in output from:

ceph device ls

You can also query the metadata for a specific device with:

ceph device info <devid>

You can explicitly force prediction of a device’s life expectancy with:

ceph device predict-life-expectancy <devid>

If you are not using Ceph’s internal device failure prediction but have some external source of information about device failures, you can inform Ceph of a device’s life expectancy with:

ceph device set-life-expectancy <devid> <from> [<to>]

Life expectancies are expressed as a time interval so that uncertainty can be expressed in the form of a wide interval. The interval end can also be left unspecified.

Health alerts¶

The mgr/devicehealth/warn_threshold controls how soon an expected device failure must be before we generate a health warning.

The stored life expectancy of all devices can be checked, and any appropriate health alerts generated, with:

ceph device check-health

Automatic Mitigation¶

If the mgr/devicehealth/self_heal option is enabled (it is by default), then for devices that are expected to fail soon the module will automatically migrate data away from them by marking the devices “out”.

The mgr/devicehealth/mark_out_threshold controls how soon an expected device failure must be before we automatically mark an osd “out”.