Planning storage capacity

The Storage panel provides real-time and historical visibility into disk utilization across the WarehousePG (WHPG) cluster. Use these actions to monitor current capacity, isolate hardware-specific imbalances, and forecast future storage requirements.

Monitoring cluster-wide capacity

Use the Overview tab to perform a high-level audit of your total storage footprint and ensure data is spread evenly across the cluster infrastructure.

• Evaluate total headroom: Check the capacity metrics for total Used vs. Free space. If the average usage percentage across the cluster exceeds 70%, begin identifying data archival candidates.
• Identify storage imbalances: Review the Free Space Distribution visualization. If certain nodes have significantly less free space than others, it usually indicates data skew at the database level that requires re-distribution.
• Audit node-level partitions: Use the Storage Details** table to inspect specific mount points (e.g., /data vs. /var/log). This helps you determine if storage pressure is being caused by database files or by expanding system logs and temporary files.

Isolating host and mount point issues

Use the specialized By Host and By Mount tabs to differentiate between database growth and underlying operating system constraints.

• Detect hardware-specific bottlenecks: Use the By Host view to isolate individual nodes. If a single host is nearing capacity while others are empty, investigate the physical health of that node's drives or specific local file ingestion.
• Compare identical storage paths: Use the By Mount view to compare usage across all /data directories in the cluster. This allows you to verify if the database is consuming space symmetrically across your storage tier.

Forecasting and growth analysis

Use the Historical tab to move from reactive monitoring to proactive capacity planning.

• Analyze consumption trends: Review the Historical Storage Trends graphs to determine your daily or weekly ingest rate. Use this trend to predict exactly when your current storage volume will reach a critical state.
• Identify seasonal growth patterns: Look for analytical spikes in the growth patterns view. Correlating these spikes with specific batch jobs or ETL cycles helps you schedule maintenance or expansion before peak load periods.

Responding to storage pressure recommendations

Follow these protocols when storage indicators reach the warning (> 70%) or critical (> 90%) thresholds to prevent database write failures.

• Analyze table and index volume: If storage is running low, navigate to the Data Analysis panel to identify the largest tables and indexes. Focus on high-growth objects that are the primary drivers of disk consumption. See Analyzing data distribution for details.
• Monitor for database bloat: Check for high levels of dead tuples. Reclaiming space from bloated tables through vacuuming can often postpone the need for physical hardware expansion.
• Initiate data archiving: Move historical or low-access data to cold storage or external archives. This reduces the primary disk footprint while keeping the data available for long-term compliance or infrequent queries.
• Execute capacity planning: If growth is consistent with expected usage and cannot be mitigated by archiving or vacuuming, consult your administrator. Use the historical growth trends to justify adding additional disk space or scaling out with more cluster nodes.