Key Metrics for Effective Storage Performance and Capacity Reporting - Workload Profiles (10 of 10)

As mentioned previously the Read/Write metrics can help you to get a handle on your workload profiles.

Application type is important in estimating performance risk, for instance, something like Exchange is a heavy I/O user.

I’ve also seen examples where virtual workstations were being installed and resulted in a large I/O hit that could have impacted other applications sharing storage.

Scorecards

This is an example of a score card, where you can have a large amount of information condensed in to one easy to view dashboard.

Dashboards

I've included an example below of how you can set up a dashboard and bring key trending and standard reports to you all in one place.

Trending, forecasting, and exceptions with athene®

Storage Key Metrics – Summary

To summarize

•        Knowledge of your storage architecture is critical, you may need to talk to a separate storage team to get this information

•        Define storage occupancy versus performance

•        Discuss space utilization and define

•        Review virtualization and clustering complexities

•        Explore key metrics and their limitations

Identify key report types and areas that are most important and start with the most critical.

Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant

Dashboard (10 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

Dashboard – Overview Scorecard

In the following example of a dashboard we can immediately see that we have a green, 2 reds and some greys. Based on the green, amber and red status we can immediately see that we have an issue with a couple of these categories, memory and I/O.

Is this enough information? Who is viewing this information and does it tell them enough? If management were looking at this information they would be worried as they can see red in the status. It does scare senior management when they see a red status, mainly due to the fact that they do not have the time or inclination to see what is behind the issue. They would immediately be on the phone to their capacity management team asking why there are issues and it then causes more pressure further down the tree.

It may be that this particular issue is not an immediate problem, maybe one of the thresholds was breached during a certain time period and needs investigation.

Dashboard – Overview Scorecard Detail

We can drill down and find out some further information on the issue in this case.

In the report below there is still some red showing so it is going to have to be investigated fully and we would need to drill down even further to find out what applications are involved here.

In the further drill down report below we can see that we have some paging activity on Unix that has breached the threshold.

These red, amber and green scorecards have to be based on thresholds.

Where the grey is shown this simply means that there is no threshold data attached to that.

We need to get in to the details to understand what the root cause of the issue is and understand whether the issue is serious or not.

On Monday I'll be taking a closer look at Unix reports. In the meantime why not take a few minutes and complete our online Capacity Management Maturity Survey to find out where you fall on the Maturity Scale and receive a 20 page report for free.

http://www.metron-athene.com/_capacity-management-maturity-survey/survey.asp

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant