topic Re: Analysing CIFS share file type usage in ONTAP Discussions

Analysing CIFS share file type usage

shocko — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:25:54 GMT

I have several hundred CIFS shares with 90 millions files therein on a C-Mode 9.x cluster. I'm looking for a tool(s) that can scan them all and create reports showing the number of files, file-type/extension and locations they are in. Does NetApp have anything for this other than FSA (file System Analytics). I have found FSA adds a lot of CPU overhead.

Other tools I have tried:

JAM Treesize professional (No DB store for historic analysis)
Scripting (cumbersome and need our own DB schema to store results at this volume)
JAM Space Observer (cannot handle the load at this number of files)

Re: Analysing CIFS share file type usage

elementx — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:43:31 GMT

There are nice professional tools from partners like DataDobi and others.

Building your own isn't that hard, there are advantages and disadvantages to building your own. I got good results, it scaled very well (tested with 0.5, 1, 2, and 4 million files).

https://scaleoutsean.github.io/2025/06/05/simple-filesystem-and-s3-analytics-and-mcp.html#example-smb-share

I'd say the hard part is when you start having multiple users, when you need permissions (who can see what), authentication, people want fancy Web charts and it can becomes a distraction and/or time sink... If that can happen, it's probably better to buy than build...

Re: Analysing CIFS share file type usage

Sanaman — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:42:28 GMT

Try the NABox (Harvest/ Grafana) based. Developed by NetApp developers.

Re: Analysing CIFS share file type usage

elementx — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 02:10:19 GMT

Seriously? Harvest doesn't access network shares, how could it know anything about the files on them?

Re: Analysing CIFS share file type usage

sanmanjax — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:11:24 GMT

I believe that NetApp Classification is the tool for you - you can scan for stale files, find duplicates, get reports on share, file & folder security, identify sensitive information, & more. The best part is that it is FREE under 500 TiB! Our environment currently in Classification is 189.2M files consuming 137.85 TiB.

I have found it to be very programmer-friendly, too, if you're into that.

Best wishes,
Daniel

Re: Analysing CIFS share file type usage

robverhoeven — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 13:32:52 GMT

I think XCP is also able to do this.... see https://xcp.netapp.com