Introduction to Watch Folders and the Aspera Watch Service

Watch Folders and the Aspera Watch Service offer tools for easily monitoring file system changes in real time and automatically transferring new and modified files.

Watch Folders

Watch Folders enables large-scale, automated file and directory transfers, including ultra-large directories with over 10 million items and directories with "growing" files. Watch Folders use input from the Aspera Watch service to automate transfers of files that were added to or modified in a source folder. They can be configured to push from the local server or pull from a remote server. Remote servers can be HSTS, HSTE, and IBM Aspera Shares servers, and the servers in object storage. Push Watch Folders can use IBM Aspera on Cloud and IBM Aspera Transfer Cluster Manager nodes for a destination.

Watch Folders can be created and managed in the GUI or the command line.

Note: Watch Folders use a Redis in-memory database. Calculate about 1 GB of memory to be used by Redis for every 1 million files that are contained in the directory that is being watched. One way to free up memory is to use the post processing options to remove files after they are transferred.

Aspera Watch Service

The Aspera Watch Service (asperawatchd) is a file system change detection and snapshot service that is optimized for speed, scale, and distributed sources. On file systems that have file system notifications, changes in source file systems (new files and directories, deleted items, and renames) are detected immediately, eliminating the need to scan the file system. On file systems without file notifications, such as object storage, and AIX file system scans are automatically triggered.

The Aspera Watch Service monitors changes to the file system by taking snapshots and analyzing the difference between them. Users create watches by subscribing to a watch service and specifying the part of the file system to watch. You can use the output from the Aspera Watch service to generate a source file list for ascp and async sessions.

Watch Services can be started and managed in the GUI or command line. The Watch Service itself and watches can be only managed from the command line.

For more information, see:

Aspera Run Service (asperarund)

The the IBM Aspera Run Service manages both the Aspera Watch service and the Aspera Watch Folders service. It stores both their configurations in its database, automatically starts the services when they are added, and restarts services if they fail. It also enables admins to start services under different users without switching between accounts, and to apply logging and database configurations to all services.

Similar to other Aspera services, the IBM Aspera Run Service starts automatically upon installation and runs as a service in the Windows Services list (Search from the taskbar and type Services).

For more information about asperarund, see Creating, managing, and configuring services.