This comes up quite a lot. There are a lot of stats available on the NetApp / N-Series systems. You can get them very easily through PerfStat, statit, stats, Operations Manager, and even the API. But what isn’t always clearly defined was what does each of these counters mean, and in the case of the histograms, what does each field represent?

You can get some information from “stats explain” (have a loot at Performance “stats” without PerfStat or Ops Mgr for more info), but this doesn’t include everything, and certainly doesn’t include much helpful information on some of the diagnostic stats.

I have spent a lot of time examining AutoSupports, and one little trump I found was that at the top of the “cm_stats” file was an XML listing of all the stats and their full description. Very useful! You don’t need to be a techie to turn XML into an Excel spreadsheet (in fact Excel does it for you), but as a good source for reference, please find attached a full listing of all the statistics and their descriptions for the NetApp systems.

cm_stats.xls