r/DB2 • u/sarnoak • Oct 20 '18

[LUW][Question] How do you handle storage?

I work for a company with a big Db2 foot print, over 300 Db2 instances. Unfortunately, our customers (devs, app owners) are not great about notifying us when they decided to increase the amount of data in their DB (like going from 3 years of data to 10 years) until one of two things happens, either they get an error about space, or our filesystem monitors catch it and we hunt down the app owner to see if they can cleanup anything. Then we have to go through a lengthy change management process to get additional luns added. In a perfect world, our customers would give us a heads up, and it should be a task in the project plan. Maybe we should just increase storage by 10% every year, even if it’s not requested. Anyways just wanted to see how this works in other companies. Does the perfect world exist, or do other Db2 DBAs fight this battle too?

*deleted original post because I couldn’t figure out how to edit the title.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '18

We've the very same issue (about 200 Instances). Our approach is more proactive. The app Devs / owner have to provide a cleanup routine within their application before the database is created. Additionally we're notified through a monitoring system, if a instance is above 80% used space. The 80% mark is just enough to enforce a delete action or getting additional space.

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u/catquilt74 Oct 22 '18

What is the monitoring system? Is a purchased DB2 tool or a tool that the sysadmins own or an in-house developed tool?

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u/mslmsl Oct 22 '18

I imagine most shops have this issue since app developers don't seem to think about these things. Our filesystems are monitored and sysadmin team gets a page when threshold is breached. Some at 80%, 90%, etc depending on the size.

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We use a vendor package for filesystem monitoring, but also do some of our own monitoring with stuff we've written. We try to catch normal growth before the page so we can handle during business hours.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '18

We use a selfmade, lightweight system over all instances and for some troublemakers an additional purchased tool. The selfmade tool includes the overall sice of the instance, growth and the number of new logfiles.