If you have enabled File System Analytics on volumes whose containing SVM is in a protection relationship, the analytics data is not replicated to the destination SVM. If the source SVM must be resynchronized in a recovery operation, you must manually reenable analytics on desired volumes after recovery.

In some cases, enabling File System Analytics could negatively impact performance during the initial metadata collection. This is most typically seen on systems that are at maximum utilization. To avoid enabling analytics on such systems, you can use ONTAP System Manager performance monitoring tools.

When you enable capacity analytics, ONTAP conducts an initialization scan for capacity analytics. The scan accesses metadata for all files in volumes for which capacity analytics is enabled. No file data is read during the scan. Beginning in ONTAP 9.14.1, you can track the progress of the scan with the REST API, in the Explorer tab of ONTAP System Manager, or with the volume analytics show CLI command. If there is a throttling event, ONTAP provides a notification.

When enabling File System Analytics on a volume, ensure that at least 5 to 8 percent of the volume’s available space is free. If the volume has autosize enabled, calculate the available size based on the maximum autogrow size. Beginning with ONTAP 9.15.1, ONTAP presents an error message if there’s not enough space available when you enable File System Analytics on a volume.

After the scan completes, File System Analytics is continuously updated in real time as the file system changes.

The time required for the scan is proportional to the number of directories and files on the volume. Because the scan collects metadata, file size does not impact the scan time.