NetApp ONTAP Performance Monitoring Commands Guide

2026年8月25日 LOG admin

When an ONTAP cluster slows down, the first question is always: is it CPU, network, or disk? NetApp's knowledge base answers that with a specific set of performance commands, each aimed at a different layer of the stack. This article explains the six essential ONTAP 9 performance monitoring commands - statistics show-periodic, sysstat -x 1, sysstat -M 1, statit, wafltop and qos statistics - and what each column actually tells you about your storage system's health.

statistics show-periodic: Cluster-Wide Live View

cluster1::*> statistics show-periodic -node node1

Useful columns: cpu busy shows CPU usage across CPU domains; data columns show Ethernet throughput on all NICs of the node; cluster columns show how much data is flowing through the Cluster LIFs; disk columns show disk read/write activity. This is the best first command for a broad overview.

sysstat -x 1: CPU and Consistency Points

cluster1::> node run local sysstat -x 1

Columns to watch: CPU tells overall CPU utilization; CP time is the time spent flushing a Consistency Point (CP) from RAM to disk - useful when troubleshooting back-to-back CPs; CP_Ty identifies CP types; Cache hit and Disk util show cache effectiveness and disk busy percentage. This command, statit and wafltop are node shell commands (the last three need advanced or diagnostic privilege, priv set diag).

sysstat -M 1: Per-Domain CPU Breakdown

cluster1::*> set diag
cluster1::*> node run -node netapp-01 sysstat -M 1

This view shows utilization of network CPU processing (Nwk_Exmpt) and Data Processing / WAFL (WAFL_Ex), plus per-CPU core utilization. If WAFL_Ex is saturated while Nwk_Exmpt is low, the bottleneck is in the data path (WAFL), not the network.

statit: Per-Disk Latency and IOPS

Cluster::*> node run -node filer
filer> priv set advanced
filer*> statit -b
(wait 30 or more seconds)
filer*> statit -e

Key columns: ut% is the percentage of time the disk had I/O commands; xfers shows disk IOPS per drive (xfers = ureads + writes + cpreads + greads + gwrites); chain is the average I/O size in 4KB units; usecs is the average disk round-trip latency per 4K block. High usecs with high ut% identifies hot drives in an aggregate.

wafltop and qos statistics

wafltop gives a real-time view of WAFL activity including file system operations and buffer usage. qos statistics commands (e.g. qos statistics volume latency show) expose per-volume latency and throughput, which is how you confirm which workload is suffering before you change anything. Combine these with Active IQ Unified Manager for threshold-based alerting and root-cause analysis.