SPACEWatch | Overview - Investigate your storage

People often say they “can’t see the wood for the trees” when there is too much detail to be able to understand what’s really important. If you’ve ever tried to discover how your PC, server or network storage is being used you will understand the relevance of this well known phrase. Using multiple techniques to investigate storage use throws up new and unexpected results Tactically its useful to know when storage is running out. SPACEWatch’s Network Summary shows the status of volumes across the network. If one is starting to get full, SPACEWatch will calculate when it thinks that the volume will run out of space altogether. Instead of having to keep a manual check, SPACEWatch can send a report automatically via email. In fact there are many built-in reports that can be automatically generated. And if these aren’t enough, the SPACEWatch Custom Report Designer can come to the rescue. Often its necessary to look at storage use in a little more detail - e.g. based on who is consuming storage, or where its stored on the file system. The User Find tool helps with the first challenge; the Treesize tool helps with the second. When investigating trees and folders, the sheer quantity of items can again become an issue. To address this, SPACEWatch lets you filter out trees that aren’t consuming much storage. It also uses a novel Treemap approach to reveal folders that consume lots of storage - but may be hidden deep down a directory tree. Treemaps different sizes of directory tree boxes based on the amount of storage they consume - and are color-coded to show how “fresh” the files are in that tree: the darker pink the tree is, the older are its files. SPACEWatch makes great use of “drill down” techniques - these allow you to see more detail whenever you find something of interest. If its a directory tree, it might be the individual folders in the tree. For a particular folder it might be the files in that folder. However, SPACEWatch also allows you to drill down in different directions. For example, in the Treesize summary above you can drill down to a breakdown of all users who own files in that tree, with details such as the number of files and storage used. When investigating storage use performance is important. There’s nothing worse than waiting minutes for the next result, only to discover it wasn’t what you wanted. Some tools even require over-night reports to be run! SPACEWatch has been carefully designed to give great interactive performance, even when you have a large network with many TB of storage. That way, you can quickly follow interesting lines of investigation, wherever they lead. Can’t see the wood for the trees? Investigate how your storage is being used and who’s using it, where