By: Phil Cook
Blue Medora’s vRealize Operations Management Pack for NetApp FAS is the premier single-pane-of-glass monitoring solution for NetApp FAS storage environments. Among the most notable features in the pack are deep insights into NetApp environment health, availability, performance and capacity planning—all made possible through the powerful vRealize Operations interface.
Today we are going to take a high-level look at the dashboards and metrics offered in the NetApp FAS Management Pack. The NetApp FAS Management Pack offers several out-of-the-box dashboards which show important relationships between virtual infrastructure and storage, allowing a detailed look into metrics such as performance, QoS, health, and availability.
#1: NetApp FAS Overview Dashboard
A great place to start for any administrator is the NetApp Overview Dashboard.This dashboard shows heat maps for Clusters, Systems, Storage Virtual Machines, Volumes, LUNs, Disks, and more. Each section can be configured to show a subset of options such as Total IOPS, health, latency, and capacity. The “show detail” icon will browse to the device, which can be used to view health alerts, troubleshoot metrics, and more.
Figure 1.1: NetApp Overview Dashboard
#2: Storage Topology Dashboard
Storage Topology Dashboard is another great asset to an administrator by showing a top-down relationship view from the Data Center all the way down to the NetApp LUNs. The power in this dashboard is derived from the ability to see how each object in the environment ties into the overall topology. For example, clicking on a Virtual Machine health badge will show which Host System the VM resides on, the Datastore backing that Host System, the NetApp volume which hosts that datastore, etc. Being able to visualize how these systems are integrated can accelerate the troubleshooting process by understanding where in the stack a problem is occurring and what the alert details show as the scope of that problem.
Figure 1.2: NetApp Storage Topology Dashboard
#3: Troubleshooting > All Metrics
Another key feature of the NetApp FAS Management Pack is the ability to view metrics for troubleshooting, analyzing trends, and diagnosing anomalies. Figure 1.3 below shows the Total Throughput in KiloBytes per second for the particular NetApp system. The dark line represents the actual throughput data, while the yellow line shows the trend line of how the metric is projected to change.
Figure 1.3: NetApp Metrics View
#4: Analysis > Anomalies
Anomalies, found under the Analysis tab in vROps as shown in Figure 1.4, displays when a particular metric value falls out of normal range. The health score for the NetApp system based on the anomalies found indicates the scope of the potential problems found, and what areas need to be addressed. The lower the score, the better the health of the system. Below the score, the anomalous objects are shown, describing which metric event went out of normal range and what the value was.
Figure 1.4: NetApp Anomalies
#5: Storage Capacity Remaining
The final key feature of the NetApp FAS Management Pack that we’ll discuss today is the ability to drill down to the storage layer and view capacity breakdowns. As you can see in Figure 1.5, an administrator can easily view how much space remains on the storage device, the efficiency of the device, and even how the capacity is trending in order to properly plan for the future.
Figure 1.5: NetApp Capacity
The NetApp FAS Management Pack for vRealize Operations Manager shows its true value by allowing an administrator to view all of the layers of NetApp FAS storage up to the virtualization layer and beyond from one user interface. In combination with other Blue Medora Management Packs as part of the True Visibility Suite for VMware, vROps truly becomes the single monitoring platform for the entire stack.
