Veritas Data Insight Administrator's Guide

About FPolicy

Veritas Data Insight uses the FPolicy framework provided by NetApp to collect access events from the NetApp filers.

NetApp provides an interface called FPolicy which allows external applications to receive file access notifications from the NetApp Storage subsystem. FPolicy allows partner applications to perform tasks like file access screening and auditing. The FPolicy interface uses Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and external applications can use these tools to register with the NetApp Filer as FPolicy servers. FPolicy supports both CIFS and NFS.

The unit of FPolicy configuration on the NetApp filer is called a policy, which is identified by a user specified name. You can configure a policy to monitor all or a list of volumes on the NetApp filer along with a specified set of operations. The monitored operations are open, close, read, write, create, delete, rename, and set attribute. As soon as a file operation is performed on a file or folder on the filer which is being monitored, a notification is sent to the registered FPolicy server asynchronously.

By default, Data Insight does not register for read and close events from NetApp filers. Data Insight treats an open event as a read event. This behavior reduces the load on the filer in case of peak traffic loads from third party applications like backups over CIFS. It also does not have an adverse effect for most consumer applications because consumer applications seldom write to a file before first reading it. Data Insight assumes that an open event is almost always be followed by a read event and then optionally by a write event. However, you can customize the default behavior as per your requirements.

See Enabling export of NFS shares on a NetApp file server.

See Configuring NetApp audit settings for performance improvement.