NetApp provides various tools to monitor the health of its storage systems to identify and troubleshoot any issues that may arise quickly. Using these tools effectively is key for organizations that rely on NetApp storage to run critical applications and workloads.
In this article, we will talk about the key NetApp monitoring tools that assist with keeping a close eye on system health across various components.
Why is continuous system health monitoring necessary?
System health monitoring provides ongoing insights into infrastructure components supporting critical information systems’ performance, utilization, and availability. By establishing expected baselines for various metrics and tracking them over time, monitoring enables the detection of abnormal readings that may indicate emerging issues. Early warnings from monitoring allow addressing small problems before they cascade into major outages impacting key services and workflows.
Additionally, NetApp monitoring tools generate helpful analytics around usage trends, load projections, and optimization recommendations for boosting system efficiencies over the long run via appropriate sizing. Intelligent forecasting models further assist capacity planning and budgeting aligned to organizational objectives by using reactive and proactive monitoring capabilities, infrastructure stability, resilience, and progress to stay aligned through deeper visibility across the technology stack and powering institutional operations.
The following are the tools that help monitor the systems.
OnCommand System Manager
OnCommand System Manager is the primary management interface for NetApp’s ONTAP data management software. It provides a dashboard view of the storage systems’ and clusters’ overall status and health metrics. System administrators can quickly check for alerts, events, or irregular patterns through intuitive dashboards instead of logging into multiple areas to gather info.
Some ways OnCommand System Manager helps you in system monitoring:
- At-a-glance health overview of connected systems via color-coded health indicators
- Summary dashboard showing storage resource utilization and performance
- Granular insight into system capacity, network traffic, CPU usage, and disk activity
- Email alerts for predefined performance threshold breaches
- Customizable performance threshold limits for proactive notifications
- Historical performance charts to analyze trends over time
- Detailed event and notification logs for diagnosing problems
By centralizing various monitoring use cases via role-based access, OnCommand System Manager enables quick detection of abnormalities before they escalate into issues impacting key workloads.
OnCommand Unified Manager
While OnCommand System Manager handles real-time monitoring, OnCommand Unified Manager focuses on historical analysis for long-term optimization. It captures and stores detailed performance data for NetApp clusters over months and years to derive actionable insights.
OnCommand Unified Manager helps administrators:
- Establish baseline metrics for resource usage patterns
- Uncover utilization inefficiencies via usage and occupancy statistics
- Identify overworked components causing hotspots
- Determine capacity shortage risks through projected growth trends
- Right-size clusters based on actual consumption by volumes and workloads
- Plan infrastructure expansion budgets wisely
With the information about usage and workload trends, OnCommand Unified Manager guides intelligent infrastructure planning aligned to business objectives over time rather than reactive fixes to firefighting.
Active IQ Digital Advisor
Active IQ leverages big data analytics and machine learning algorithms to power the Digital Advisor module for proactive wellness monitoring. It assesses configurations and usage patterns on ONTAP storage for risks and anomalies.
Intelligent automation helps administrators by continually:
- Evaluating system health indicators against industry best practices
- Identifying potential problems and gaps hindering performance
- Providing actionable recommendations to mitigate or prevent issues
- Comparing configurations to optimize utilization and efficiencies
- Highlighting firmware versions, licenses, and protocols deviating from recommended standards
Constantly surveying systems against cloud-sourced benchmarks, Active IQ Digital Advisor provides corrective guidance and drives overall system enhancements.
Active IQ Unified Manager
While Digital Advisor focuses on predictive guidance, Active IQ Unified Manager concentrates on historical analysis of performance metrics. It tracks storage resource usage while highlighting problems requiring attention through machine learning algorithms.
Active IQ Unified Manager assists teams by:
- Aggregating performance metrics from NetApp arrays across protocols and workloads
- Baselining expected range for latency, IOPS, MBps, and utilization metrics
- Automatically detecting and alerting anomalous readings breaching expected bands
- Providing historical charts to analyze event timelines and impacted workloads
- Identifying choke points degrading cluster or workload efficiency
- Suggesting infrastructure or configuration changes to meet SLOs
With Digital Advisor recommendations, Active IQ Unified Manager offers data-backed validation to size systems aligned to actual needs while improving SLAs.
Conclusion
NetApp offers robust and complementary tools across the monitoring spectrum to assess health, utilization, and efficiency across ONTAP environments. While OnCommand System Manager handles real-time monitoring, Unified Manager focuses on historical analysis for optimization. Active IQ leverages machine learning and big data to power intelligent automation for identifying risks proactively and guiding configurations.
Using these tools in conjunction allows administrators to keep their eye closely on overall system wellness through both lenses – short-term performance and long-term efficiency. The actionable insights help evolve storage networks and capacity aligned to workload demands over time while avoiding costly interruptions.
