Monitoring the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) Family

eG Enterprise provides a 100%, web-based HP EVA Storage monitoring model that observes the state and overall performance of the core components of a HP EVA storage array, and proactively alerts administrators to current/potential issues in array performance.

Figure 1 : The layer model of the HP EVA storage array

Each layer of Figure 1 above is mapped to a wide variety of tests that report a wealth of information pertaining to the HP EVA storage array, using which administrators can find quick and accurate answers to the following queries:

• Has any temperature sensor failed?
• Is the temperature of any sensor abnormally high?
• Have any communication buses failed?
• Has any enclosure EMU failed?
• Are the fans operating normally in the enclosure and on the controller? Has any fan failed?
• Is any enclosure module in an abnormal state currently? If so, which one?
• Has any power supply unit failed in the enclosure or in the controller? Is any unit about to fail?
• Is any disk group running out of space?
• Is the I/O traffic on any disk group abnormally high?
• Are all physical disks on the array healthy? Is any disk inaccessible?
• Is any physical disk experiencing slowdowns in read/write operations?
• Are the LUN groups utilizing their caches effectively, or are too may read/write requests to the LUN groups being serviced by direct disk accesses?
• Has any LUN failed?
• Are all LUNs utilizing their caches effectively, or is any LUN servicing many of its read/write requests by directly accessing the disk?
• Are all device ports on the controller functioning normally?
• Is any device port down?
• Is any device port experiencing too many errors? If so, what type of errors are these?
• Has any fibre channel port failed or is about to fail?
• Are there any invalid/bad fibre channel ports on the controller?
• Is the EVA system operating normally? Does the system have adequate free spaace?
• Has any cache battery failed?
• Are all controllers healthy?
• Is the temperature of any controller very high?
• Is any controller utilizing CPU resources excessively?
• Is the array able to quickly process all requests from external hosts, or are too many outstanding requests in queue? Which external host is responsible for the maximum number of requests?
• Is any host port experiencing a bottleneck during request processing?
• Are too many requests awaiting processing by a host port? If so, which host port is it?