Orchestrating Zero-Downtime Disk Space Recovery

Use Case 05

Production app server. 500GB root volume. Log rotation cron job failed 9 days ago. Logs accumulating at 2GB/day. Disk at 94% utilization.

What's Actually Happening (Without ITOM)

At 95%+ disk, the database engine freezes writes to prevent corruption. Critical threshold is only 6 hours away. A cron job misconfiguration is the root cause — entirely invisible to standard monitoring.

What ITOM Does — Step by Step

1. ITOM detects disk utilization crossing 85% automated remediation threshold
2. Identifies log files as primary space consumer via inode analysis
3. Checks CMDB — confirms approved automated log archival runbook exists for this server class
4. Executes: compress logs >7 days → move to cold storage → archive to S3 → verify recovery → open low-priority ticket

ITOM Alert Output

> ITOM Auto-Remediation: APP-PROD-07
> Trigger: Disk utilization 85% (threshold)
> Root cause: Log accumulation (cron failure)
> Action: Log archival workflow executed
> Recovered: 78GB | Utilization: 94% → 62%
> Ticket opened: Cron repair on next maintenance window

Without ITOM vs. With ITOM

Without ITOM: 2 AM emergency call. Database writes freeze. Service degradation. Incident ticket.

With ITOM: Engineer sees a low-priority ticket Monday AM. Service never degraded. Root cause documented.

Key Metrics

• 78GB — Space recovered
• 94→62% — Disk utilization
• 0 min — Service downtime
• 0 — On-call pages