Running Ceph in production means embracing a powerful, flexible storage system, but also one that demands attention. A healthy Ceph cluster doesn’t just happen by chance. It’s the result of consistent monitoring, proactive maintenance and knowing where to focus your time.

In this blog, we’ll walk through proven best practices we’ve seen work across environments of all sizes. Whether you’re managing Ceph on-premises or as part of a broader hybrid infrastructure, these habits will help you keep your cluster stable, performant and resilient.

Monitor what matters, not just what’s easy

Ceph provides an overwhelming amount of metrics. The key is to focus on signals that reflect the actual health and performance of your cluster. That means more than just tracking capacity or uptime.

Prioritize:

• OSD status and performance
• Placement group states
• Cluster latency (client and backend)
• Recovery and backfill operations
• Monitor quorum and clock drift

A good rule of thumb: if it affects how fast or reliably your applications access data, it’s worth watching.

Use real monitoring tools, not just the CLI

While ceph status and ceph health are useful, they only show you what’s happening now, not how things are trending or where bottlenecks are developing.

Integrate your Ceph metrics into tools like:

• Prometheus + Grafana
• Zabbix or Icinga
• ELK stack for log analysis

This gives you dashboards, alerts and historical insights. It also makes it easier to communicate cluster health to other teams.

Set alerts before there’s a problem

It’s not enough to check dashboards manually. Set up alerts that notify you when something needs attention, but avoid alert fatigue.

Examples of good alerts:

• OSDs down or flapping
• Placement groups stuck in non-active+clean states
• Slow requests or increasing latency
• Full or near-full warnings

The goal is to catch problems early, not after they’ve affected workloads.

Plan for regular maintenance

Ceph is designed for continuous operation, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore maintenance. Regular checks and updates reduce the risk of unplanned downtime.

Key maintenance routines:

• Review and rebalance data after adding or removing OSDs
• Apply updates with caution and awareness of the current cluster state
• Scrub data regularly (especially deep scrubs)
• Test recovery procedures, don’t wait until a real failure

A predictable maintenance rhythm makes incidents easier to manage.

Document and automate what you can

In complex environments, documentation and automation are your safety nets. Make sure you’ve documented:

• The layout and role of each node
• Your alert thresholds and escalation paths
• Upgrade and recovery procedures

Use automation tools like Ansible or Salt to handle routine tasks. This reduces human error and keeps your cluster behavior consistent over time.

Conclusion

A healthy Ceph cluster isn’t just about avoiding red alerts. It’s about visibility, consistency and staying ahead of issues before they escalate. By following these best practices, you can turn your Ceph environment into a dependable backbone for your infrastructure, one that scales, adapts and keeps running even when things around it don’t.

Want to dive deeper or see how others are managing production Ceph clusters? Reach out, we’re always happy to share what we’ve learned.