Monitoring

[chunklet]

Just curious what everyone is using for monitoring tools.

Thanks!

superchunk

[Perconte]

Mostly just the iops in IMC. If I need to look to a certain behavior at a certain point of time I use System Reporter.

[hdtvguy]

3par System Reporter, great tool allows granular per disk per lun type stats. My biggest complaint is since they moved AO to the controllers there are no more AO reports. We publish daily reports that any app person can access and see that storage is NOT part of any issue they are having.

[rotorhead1]

CLI, IMC, System Reporter. We have some ideas about going to Storage Essentials to get the whole SAN perspective from host, switch, and array. Sometimes can be hard with large fabrics. We have mulitple arrays with over 130 edge switches and 700 hosts. If anyone else has suggestions please post. I would be interested to know what folks are using.

JD

[Richard Siemers]

We had issues with windows and ESX hosts not doing Round Robin load balancing. When multiple hosts picked the same 3PAR port as their "primary active" path instead of properly balancing across all 4 paths, we would encounter performance bottlenecks at the congested port.

We deployed SAN Screen, which is now Netapp OnCommand Insight. It polls perf and alias data from the SAN switches, as well as ESX and the 3PAR. One of the reports it provides is a balance index, that compares the amount of traffic between the host's HBA ports and alarms when its not 50% - 50%, which happens just about every time they build a new Windows server by hand

SAN Screen also does a good job of mapping a 3PAR lun to an ESX datastore, and down to the VMDKs on that datastore. So when I have a hot LUN I want to learn more about, I can track it down to the guest VM.

[Simi]

I use a cool monitoring tool named 3PAR Vision. It is developed by a French solution integrator Antemeta.
Nice interface, clear graphs with usefull options (resolution (high, hourly, daily), zoom, highlights (week-end, day, night, day of week), AO policies, disk types, ...)
Please find some screenshots attached to this post !
Editor's 3PAR Vision link
Demo video link at HP DISCOVER Vienna 2012

[afidel]

That's identical data to IMC or system reporter graphs, though they are a bit prettier, can't imagine paying for a package for prettier graphing personally.

[Gatorfreak]

I tried System Reporter but didn't care much for it.

For a few years now I've been using Cacti to create graphs of various EVA metrics on our EVAs. The evaperf output gets imported into Cacti constantly. I took the same approach with 3Par. The CLI has very similar commands and options as the EVA's evaperf.

Oh, and Cacti is free.

[Architect]

care to share the cacti scripts and setup? would be really interested to see how that runs on my test box.