Monitoring the Storage RAID

eG Enterprise provides a dedicated monitoring model for monitoring the Storage RAID.

Figure 3 : The generic Storage Raid model

Every layer of this ‘agentless’ model is mapped to a set of tests that monitors every aspect of storage performance – from the health of the hardware (batteries, LED sensors, power supply units etc.) to the health of core components of the storage device – e.g., disks, LUNs, RAID ports, controllers – is monitored in an agentless manner. Failures, error conditions, high load situations, load balancing irregularities and hot-spots are detected and alerted to administrators so they can initiate corrective actions.

Using the metrics reported by this model, administrators can find quick and accurate answers to the following performance queries:

• Has any hardware component of the storage RAID failed? If so, what is it - is it a fan? a PSU? a battery? or an indicator LED? What could have caused this failure?
• Is any disk in an abnormal state?
• Is any disk overloaded with I/O requests?
• Has any LUN experienced any failures? If so, which LUN is it?
• Is I/O load uniformly distributed across all LUNs or is any LUN overloaded?
• Is any LUN experiencing any slowdown when processing I/O requests?
• Have any non-recoverable errors been detected on a storage processor?
• Is I/O load uniformly distributed across all storage processors?
• Is any storage processor experiencing any slowdown when processing I/O requests?
• Is any port experiencing abnormal I/O activity?
• Is any storage array in a degraded state currently?
• Is any storage array overloaded with I/O requests?
• Is the storage system effectively utilizing its cache to service I/O requests?