How to Monitor Hitachi AMS Storage Device Using eG Enterprise?

eG Enterprise  monitors the Hitachi AMS storage device in an agentless manner. In order to monitor the storage device, eG Enterprise deploys a remote agent and an external agent. For collecting performance statistics, eG agent uses the following information sources:

  • The Performance Monitor software that is installed with the storage device;

    The Performance Monitor is a controller-based software application that acquires information on the performance of RAID groups, logical units, and other elements of the disk subsystem while tracking the utilization rates of resources such as hard disk drives and processors. To periodically run the Performance Monitor application and to extract the metrics of interest from the storage device, a client utility named the Storage Navigator Modular (AMS) must be available on the eG agent host.

    The tests that need to access the Performance Monitor should then be configured with the path to the Storage Navigator. This way, whenever that test is run, the eG agent executing the test automatically invokes the storage navigator client via CLI, which then connects to the storage device, accesses the Performance Monitor on the device, and extracts the desired metrics.

  • The SNMP MIB of the device;

    A few other tests executed by the eG agent collect the statistics of interest using SNMP-based access to the MIB statistics of the storage device. For these tests to work, you first need to SNMP-enable the storage device.

While you need to configure a remote agent for accessing the Performance Monitor software and collecting metrics, an external agent is necessary for performing the SNMP-based monitoring. 

Note:

If need be, you can configure a ‘single agent’ to function both as a remote agent and as an external agent for monitoring the Hitachi AMS storage device.

To enable the remote or external agent to connect and communicate with the Hitachi AMS storage device, a set of pre-requisites should be fulfilled. These requirements have been discussed in Pre-requisites for Monitoring the Hitachi AMS. Once the pre-requisites are fulfilled, start monitoring the storage device. The broad steps for monitoring the storage device using eG Enterprise are as follows: