Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
CephFS Tell-Me-What-Happened --Yes-I-Really-Really-Mean-It - Anthony D'Atri, IBM
Have you ever found your CephFS setup mysteriously broken and had no clue how it got there? Maybe someone ran a CLI command in haste, or a misstep happened weeks ago. We have suspicions, but can’t really recall what might've splintered the system. That changes now.
In this talk, we introduce a robust command history logging mechanism for CephFS: a persistent log of CephFS commands and standalone tool invocations, backed by LibCephSQLite. Think of it as “shell history,” but purpose-built for Ceph with time ranges, filters, and structured metadata. Every ceph fs subvolume rm, every ceph config set, every mischievous --force — now recorded, timestamped, and queryable.
Want to know what was run last Tuesday at 3 AM? Or who triggered that well-intentioned-but-catastrophic disaster recovery script? Or just list the last 100 commands before things exploded? It’s all there. This helps debug incidents faster, provides a clear audit trail, and opens the door to proactive traceability. So, when things go sideways around CephFS and no one's sure why — this history has your back.
This is CephFS-first but not CephFS-only. The path to full cluster command traceability starts here.
CephFS Tell-Me-What-Happened --Yes-I-Really-Really-Mean-It - Anthony D'Atri, IBM
Have you ever found your CephFS setup mysteriously broken and had no clue how it got there? Maybe someone ran a CLI command in haste, or a misstep happened weeks ago. We have suspicions, but can’t really recall what might've splintered the system. That changes now.
In this talk, we introduce a robust command history logging mechanism for CephFS: a persistent log of CephFS commands and standalone tool invocations, backed by LibCephSQLite. Think of it as “shell history,” but purpose-built for Ceph with time ranges, filters, and structured metadata. Every ceph fs subvolume rm, every ceph config set, every mischievous --force — now recorded, timestamped, and queryable.
Want to know what was run last Tuesday at 3 AM? Or who triggered that well-intentioned-but-catastrophic disaster recovery script? Or just list the last 100 commands before things exploded? It’s all there. This helps debug incidents faster, provides a clear audit trail, and opens the door to proactive traceability. So, when things go sideways around CephFS and no one's sure why — this history has your back.
This is CephFS-first but not CephFS-only. The path to full cluster command traceability starts here.
