Isilon: InsightIQ: Client reports show zero throughput for some clients intermittently

Summary: When viewing a client breakout or filtering for a specific client in a report, the throughput for a client can sometimes show a value of zero.

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Symptoms

When looking at a report in InsightIQ and filtering for a specific client or breaking out by clients, in general, intermittent periods where zero throughput is being reported. For a client or even though that client is performing I/O on the OneFS cluster, is seen.

Cause

The stats engine in OneFS cannot exhaustively track all clients connected to every node. Instead, the stats engine tracks by default the top 256 clients performing I/O. This can lead to a situation where a specific client or clients perform enough I/O to be in the top 256 clients periodically. When this occurs, InsightIQ can only report on the intervals where that client or clients where in the top 256 list. The intervals where the client or clients are not in the top 256 list are reported as zero.

Resolution

WARNING: Increasing the number of clients tracked by the OneFS stats engine consumes more cluster resources, and can negatively effect client performance.

The client stats are broken down by protocol, adjust the specific number of clients tracked for each protocol independently.

To see a list of all tunable client lists by protocol, run the following command from the CLI of the OneFS cluster:   

# sysctl -a | egrep "isi.stats.client.*.max_clients"


Here is an example of the output for OneFS 8.0.0.7:   

isi01-1# sysctl -a | egrep "isi.stats.client.*.max_clients"
isi.stats.client.nfs.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.cifs.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.nlm.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.ftp.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.http.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.siq.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.iscsi.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.jobd.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.smb2.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.nfs4.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.papi.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.irp.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.lsass_out.max_clients: 256
isi.stats.client.hdfs.max_clients: 256


To increase the number of clients tracked for a specific protocol, use the sysctl that correlates to the given protocol.

The maximum number of clients that OneFS can track is 4096.

Attention: The sysctl named isi.stats.client.cifs.max_clients is for the SMB 1 protocol.

(Only registered Dell Customers can access the content on the following link, over Dell.com/support)
For direction on adjusting that sysctl and making it persist reboots and upgrades, see KB 462759: OneFS: Configuring sysctls and making sysctl changes persist through node and cluster reboots and upgrades.       

This allows more clients to be tracked by isi statistics. But no matter what, set the value to on in OneFS IIQ. This shows a max of 150 clients in the user interface and 255 in the csv export. As this is a hard coded number in InsightIQ for the breakout. It is being tracked as a future feature for these number to go higher or work in cohesion w/ OneFS settings. 

Affected Products

Isilon InsightIQ, PowerScale OneFS
Article Properties
Article Number: 000081922
Article Type: Solution
Last Modified: 20 Oct 2025
Version:  7
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