Monitoring HPE 3PAR StoreServ with Blue Medora

If data is driving the digital economy, then flash storage is its engine’s turbo charger. All flash arrays (AFA) may not feature in your data center today, but odds are soon they will. According to 451 Research, 48% of enterprises are either currently using them, piloting, or planning to do so by the end of next year. At Blue Medora, we listen carefully to customers, and heard loud and clear that deep insight into AFA performance is becoming to critical to successfully managing your data center operations. We’re pleased to announce the general availability of our newest VMware vRealize Operations® (vROps) management pack for HPE 3PAR StoreServ–one of the top 3 AFA solutions on the market today.

This management pack is licensed per Controller and has been added to the True Visibility Suite (TVS) Advanced package which is supported on vROps Advanced and vROps Enterprise.

Available Management Packs for the True Visibility Suite for VMware vRealize Operations

Blue Medora utilizes the vRealize Operations analytics engine to unveil deep insights into 3PAR StoreServ capacity, performance and configuration. Notable features of the HPE 3PAR StoreServ management pack include:

  • Three monitoring dashboards: capacity, overview, and performance
  • 200+ collected metrics for HPE 3PAR StoreServ resources
  • Key performance metrics such as total external port throughput for arrays, IOPs, throughput, and latency for virtual volumes, and cache hit read/write ratios for controller nodes
  • 22 detailed alerts and recommendations for critical events such as low capacity, high used storage ratio, port failover, and high latency
  • vROps Calculated Capacities for arrays, virtual volumes, common provisioning groups (CPGs), and disks

Installation and licensing of this management pack is trivial; simply add the solution via the vROps User Interface (UI).  Our package is less than 30MB in size and should install in minutes.  Next, configure the adapter to connect to the HPE 3PAR Web Services API (WSAPI), we support WSAPI 1.5.3 – 1.6.  Note the WSAPI must be enabled on the 3PAR array in order for our adapter to connect (it’s not by default).  This can be done via the “startwsapi” command issued from the 3PAR OS CLI.

HPE 3PAR management pack for VMware vRealize Operations configuration

Now that data is being collected, let’s have a look at some of the dashboards, reports, and alerts that are bundled into the management pack.  Three dashboards are included: capacity, overview, and performance.  Let’s have a look at the Performance dashboard.  Note that we capture performance metrics for the 3PAR array, the 3PAR virtual volumes, the related VMware datastores, and the related VMware VMs, along with users to troubleshoot performance in both directions.

Performance Dashboard in the HPE 3PAR management pack for VMware vRealize Operations

The HPE 3PAR management pack also provides five reports out of the box.  We can look at capacities, health and availability, key performance indicators (KPIs), properties, and thin provisioning in PDF and/or CSV formats provided from vROps.

Reports in the HPE 3PAR management pack for VMware vRealize Operations

We also provide 22 Alert Definitions used to generate events, determine environment health, and make improvements to the HPE 3PAR environment.

Available alerts in the HPE 3PAR management pack for VMware vRealize Operations

Modernizing your software defined data center–whether with flash storage, virtual networking, container technologies or new/no SQL databases–is critical to enabling business agility. Blue Medora simplifies operational management at every step in your journey with the broadest portfolio of deep-stack visibility solutions for vRealize, and many other monitoring solutions. To see how this management pack and others from Blue Medora can be used in your environment, try it free for 30-days.