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How-to: Find Buckets Approaching Their Quota

Use this workflow to turn bucket quota usage into a review queue before applications reach a hard storage or object-count limit.

The example identifies buckets at or above 80% of a configured quota, tags the review set, validates current usage, and adjusts only the quotas that have an approved capacity change.

Prerequisites

  • Access to Ceph Admin > Buckets.
  • Bucket quota and usage data available for the selected endpoint.
  • A capacity policy that defines warning and escalation thresholds.

1. Identify high-usage buckets

  1. Open Ceph Admin > Buckets.
  2. Enable quota and usage columns when they help the review.
  3. Open Advanced filter.
  4. Filter on bucket quota usage percentage, for example >= 80%.
  5. If needed, add owner quota or owner quota usage criteria to distinguish a bucket-level constraint from an RGW user/account constraint.
  6. Sort or narrow the result so the most urgent buckets are reviewed first.

Treat the percentage as an operational signal. Quota statistics may lag recent writes, so a near-limit result should be verified before changing capacity.

The listing can expose used capacity, configured quota, percentage, object count, and object-quota percentage together so the review is based on the actual constraint rather than the bucket name alone.

Ceph Admin bucket quota review showing used capacity, configured quota, quota percentage, and object usage Ceph Admin bucket quota review showing used capacity, configured quota, quota percentage, and object usage

2. Build a capacity review set

Select the filtered rows and use Actions… > Selection > Manage UI tags… to add a shared tag such as quota-review-80pct.

The tag lets the storage team revisit the same buckets after application owners confirm whether growth is expected.

3. Refresh usage when the decision depends on it

When the available statistics are old or the bucket recently changed quickly, select the affected buckets and run Actions… > S3 API > Calculate usage stats… before making a quota decision. Then refresh the listing and confirm the quota usage percentage again.

4. Decide the right remediation

For each reviewed bucket, choose the action that matches the cause:

  • keep the quota and ask the application owner to remove or expire data;
  • add or tighten lifecycle retention when old data is the cause;
  • increase the quota when additional capacity is approved;
  • investigate the RGW owner quota when the bucket limit is not the actual constraint.

Do not raise every quota merely because the threshold was crossed. The review exists to distinguish expected growth from retention or application problems.

5. Change approved bucket quotas

For buckets with an approved capacity change:

  1. Select only those buckets.
  2. Open Actions… > S3 API > Configure selected buckets….
  3. Choose Set bucket quota.
  4. Enter the approved size and/or object-count limit.
  5. Click Preview, review the proposed quota values for every target, then apply the change.
  6. Refresh the inventory and verify the new limit and usage percentage.

Expected result

The storage team has a reproducible list of buckets nearing quota and a clear record of which buckets were left unchanged, optimized through retention, or granted more capacity.

Limits / feature flags

Note

Set bucket quota depends on bucket statistics/usage availability for the endpoint. Quota accounting is not instantaneous, so recent writes can make displayed percentages temporarily stale.