How to expand session storage in Dynatrace Managed?

[zbyszek_cybulsk]

I have a customer who underestimated space for session storage. Short after the deployment it turned out there's no disk space for sessions. The question is: how to safely and quickly expand the size of the storage? I came to various ideas, such as creating a new partition and a symbolic link that is equivalent to the original path to the storage directory, but didn't test it because I'm afraid to break the data integrity. Please advise what the safe procedure would be, if you already successfully did that in the past.

The other issue is that such a situation should be detected in advance and the admin should be notified that in, say, 7 days the session storage will be filled in.

[krzysztof_szynt · Accepted solution]

Hi,
the approach that works best, albeit applicable mostly in hindsight before the actual installation, is to leverage LVM - logical volume manager for the volume setup. The logical volume can be then extended dynamically without downtime and can combine multiple physical volumes.

In the situation where you already have a Dynatrace Managed installation that is running into disk space issues with no LVM, you could try the following:
- stop all the services
- copy all the storage files to new disk volume
- remount the new volume exactly at the location where Dynatrace keeps the storage files

As such changes involve some risk, we would still recommend testing them upfront and backing up files before proceeding.

I would not recommend using symbolic links for the storage as it is not officially supported.

regarding the alert about storage disk filling out - I think such mechanism is in place. There should be also a notice that data gets truncated below the configured retention if the session storage gets full.

regards,
Krzysztof