By: Lora Johnson
To give you better insight into storage latency and performance issues, Blue Medora today launched an updated version of its NetApp Storage Management Pack for vRealize Operations, which now includes more external relationships and support for NetApp API Services 2.0.
With the new functionality, gain deep and narrow visibility into your NetApp Storage — complementing the broad visibility that you gain with vRealize Operations. In this blog post, we’ll cover the three key ways that the Blue Medora management pack eliminates storage bottlenecks.
Access key metrics like QoS and SnapMirror
The Blue Medora NetApp Storage Management Pack for vRealize Operations extends monitoring with more than 1,500 metrics, including those for QoS, SnapMirror and cluster/SVM monitoring.
Figure 1: See key performance indicators, relationships and metrics for any resource with the NetApp Storage Topology Dashboard
With the ability to dig deeper into metrics about your NetApp storage devices, you can gain the insight you need to determine where your performance may be lacking. In addition, leverage seven out-of-the-box dashboards and eight reports to see the health, availability and capacity of your NetApp environment.
Know when bottlenecks happen
Storage bottlenecks can devastate performance and cause your key applications to crash. It could be from your storage controllers, or maybe insufficient cache memory. Perhaps your disk drives can’t handle the workloads, or you’re experiencing inefficient load balancing.
Without insight into exactly what may be causing the bottleneck, it can take your team hours upon hours to figure out what may be causing the storage bottlenecks — mitigating performance across your stack and even causing applications to crash.
Instant and automatic alerts in the NetApp Storage Management Pack transforms troubleshooting — meaning your team spends less time figuring out what’s causing the issue, and can resolve problems quicker.
Figure 2: Simplify troubleshooting with access to more alerts and notifications
The management pack features more than 25 alerts and notifications, including insight into CPU, latency and capacity.
Identify storage latency issues
Tracking IOPS serves as a good foundation to understand how your storage workloads may perform, but to truly understand performance, you need insight into your storage latency. This gives you insight into how your storage workloads perform in current system conditions.
To easier identify storage latency issues within your NetApp workloads, Blue Medora offers a free content pack for customers — the NetApp Data ONTAP Content Pack — to complement the Blue Medora NetApp Storage Management Pack. When you use both together, you can clearly identify where storage latency issues occur and dig deeper into the information to drill down to the root cause.
For instance, if you’re experiencing latency issues, it may be due to a volume creation — which immediately results in an impact to production. Change events, which are integrated across NetApp Storage devices and vROps, help you drill down to key actions to see how they impact latency.
As a result, you can dig deeper into the issue with key metrics to identify root-cause issues and reduce mean-time-to-innocence.
For more information about the Management Pack for NetApp Storage or to download a free trial, please visit the True Visibility Suite for VMware vRealize Operations page on Blue Medora’s website.
