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QRadar: How to identify disk space issues in the root partition / by excluding mount points

How To


Summary

When the root partition / fills up, you can use tools like du and df can help identify where the space issues are. However, these commands can run slowly on large deployments. This article outlines how you can quickly find space issues in / by excluding mount points.

Objective

You can use tools like du and df to identify potential space issues, but because all mount points start with /, those tools try to scan them all, which can be run slowly in larger deployments. This article demonstrates how to optimize that process by excluding mount points. 

Steps

  1. SSH into your QRadar console.
  2. Run the following command and observe the output:
    df -h /
    In this example, we can see / is using 95% of its disk space.
    df -Th
    Filesystem                       Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    devtmpfs                         devtmpfs   16G     0   16G   0% /dev
    tmpfs                            tmpfs      16G  904K   16G   1% /dev/shm
    tmpfs                            tmpfs      16G   26M   16G   1% /run
    tmpfs                            tmpfs      16G     0   16G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-root        xfs        13G  4.9G  7.7G  95% /
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-home        xfs      1014M   35M  980M   4% /home
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-storetmp    xfs        15G  4.6G   11G  31% /storetmp
    /dev/sda3                        xfs        32G  5.4G   27G  17% /recovery
    /dev/sda2                        xfs      1014M  354M  661M  35% /boot
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-var         xfs       5.0G  284M  4.8G   6% /var
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-opt         xfs        13G  4.3G  8.3G  34% /opt
    /dev/mapper/storerhel-transient  xfs        36G   39M   36G   1% /transient
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-tmp         xfs       3.0G   67M  3.0G   3% /tmp
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-varlog      xfs        15G  1.4G   14G  10% /var/log
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-varlogaudit xfs       3.0G   96M  2.9G   4% /var/log/audit
    /dev/drbd0                       xfs       142G   36G  107G  25% /store
    tmpfs                            tmpfs     3.2G     0  3.2G   0% /run/user/0
  3. If you run du -hs *, it shows the space used in each directory, however this scans every mount point, which can run slowly on large deployments. To work around this issue, you can mount the / partition to a temporary location and then run the commands there. This step prevents the scanning of external mount points. The following commands are an example of mounting the root partition to /media/cdrom:
    mount -o bind / /media/cdrom
  4. You can now run du -hs * in the mounted directory to see all the files in / excluding the mount points like /store, /transient, etc.
    cd /media/cdrom
    du -hs *
    In the example, the /test directory is using the largest amount of space:
    0	bin
    0	boot
    0	dev
    42M	etc
    0	home
    0	lib
    0	lib64
    0	media
    0	mnt
    0	opt
    0	proc
    0	recovery
    172K	root
    8.0K	run
    0	sbin
    0	srv
    4.0K	store
    0	storetmp
    0	sys
    7.1G	test
    0	tmp
    0	transient
    3.4G	usr
    0	var
    
  5. After you remove the files that use too much space, you can check again by running the following command:
    df -Th
    Example output:
    Filesystem                       Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    devtmpfs                         devtmpfs   16G     0   16G   0% /dev
    tmpfs                            tmpfs      16G  120K   16G   1% /dev/shm
    tmpfs                            tmpfs      16G   26M   16G   1% /run
    tmpfs                            tmpfs      16G     0   16G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-root        xfs        13G  4.9G  7.7G  39% /
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-home        xfs      1014M   35M  980M   4% /home
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-storetmp    xfs        15G  201M   15G   2% /storetmp
    /dev/sda3                        xfs        32G  5.4G   27G  17% /recovery
    /dev/sda2                        xfs      1014M  354M  661M  35% /boot
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-var         xfs       5.0G  286M  4.8G   6% /var
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-opt         xfs        13G  4.3G  8.3G  34% /opt
    /dev/mapper/storerhel-transient  xfs        36G   39M   36G   1% /transient
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-tmp         xfs       3.0G   67M  3.0G   3% /tmp
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-varlog      xfs        15G  983M   15G   7% /var/log
    /dev/mapper/rootrhel-varlogaudit xfs       3.0G   88M  3.0G   3% /var/log/audit
    /dev/drbd0                       xfs       142G   35G  107G  25% /store
    tmpfs                            tmpfs     3.2G     0  3.2G   0% /run/user/0
    
  6. After you complete the cleanup, you can safely unmount the temporary mount point:
    cd /
    umount /media/cdrom

    Result
    After you identify the directories and files that are taking up too much space and clean them, you can run the following command to ensure that /media/cdrom is no longer mounted:
    df -Th

Additional Information

Document Location

Worldwide

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Document Information

Modified date:
11 January 2024

UID

ibm17105126