Monitoring EMC Centera Storage

eG Enterprise offers a specialized monitoring model that monitors the storage system inside-out and sheds light on current or probable performance dips that the storage system suffers.

Figure 1 : The layer model of the ECS Centera

Every layer of Figure 1 is mapped to a wide variety of tests that monitor critical performance parameters such as processing disk capacity, performance, and operational state of the core components of the storage system’s architecture. To pull out such useful performance data from the storage system, the eG agent needs to be configured to use EMC Centera CLI commands to query the target storage system. The eG agent then runs CLI commands to collect the desired metrics.

The metrics so collected would enable administrators to find accurate answers for the following performance queries:

  • What is the operational state of the network?

  • What is the health status of each node in the cluster?

  • Are there enough online nodes available to carry out smooth operation?

  • Is data transfer happening at optimal rate?

  • Do the pools have enough capacity to fulfill clients' data storage requirements?

  • How many nodes are in a cluster are in storage role out of total available nodes?

  • What is the raw capacity and total available capacity?

  • What is total and available capacity on each node?

  • Are there any nodes or disks in faulted state?

  • What is the average throughput of the system?

  • What are read and write transaction rates?

  • What is the uptime of the system and how long it has been since the system was last rebooted.?

To know how to configure the test associated with Network layer refer to Monitoring Unix and Windows document. The section to come will discuss the other layer in detail.