Foglight for Storage Management Shared 4.6 - User and Reference Guide

Introducing the Storage Environment Dashboard

The starting point for monitoring storage performance is the Storage Environment dashboard. The Storage Environment dashboard contains the following tabs:

If your Foglight for Storage Management user account includes the Storage Administrator role, the Storage Environment dashboard also displays these tabs:

Monitoring Your Storage Environment

When you begin monitoring your storage environment, a good way to start is by identifying poorly-performing devices and resolving the issues that are contributing to the problems. In Foglight for Storage Management, all storage devices and their child components are assigned a status, which enables you to see at glance which elements in your storage infrastructure need attention. Any device that enters a non-Normal status triggers an alarm. For more information, see Understanding Status, Alarms, and Rules in Foglight for Storage Management.

The procedures in this section show you how to use the Monitoring tab in the Storage Environment dashboard to assess alarms and drill down to the components used by storage devices, such as the LUNs and NASVolumes that supply the physical storage for datastores.

This section describes the following topics:

Understanding Status, Alarms, and Rules in Foglight for Storage Management

In Foglight for Storage Management, all storage devices and their child components are assigned a status, which enables you to see at a glance which entities in your storage infrastructure need attention. Status and alarms are controlled by rules that can be based on data, time, schedules, or events. The rule conditions define which values reflect acceptable behavior (Normal status) and which values warrant an alarm (Warning, Critical, or Fatal status). As the value associated with a monitored entity passes a condition threshold, Foglight for Storage Management generates an alarm and changes the entity’s status accordingly.

NOTE: When a component is selected, its detail views display the component’s Status followed by its State. Status is determined by Foglight for Storage Management as describe above. State refers to the physical state of a component as reported by the vendor; if the vendor does not provide the physical state, the state is unknown. A component’s physical state may affect its status only when an enabled rule triggers alarms based on state. Consult with your Foglight Administrator if you want to enable or create rules that perform this check.

A storage device often has large numbers (thousands) of child components. With a few exceptions, alarms on child components do not change the status of the parent device. For example, a failed disk may have a Fatal status, but because arrays are designed to cope with a failed disk, the parent device continues to display a Normal status. The parent device status may be changed by child components in the following circumstances:

For information about changing default rules and alarm settings, see Managing Foglight for Storage Management Rules.

Reviewing the Status of All Devices

Use the Monitoring tab in the Storage Environment dashboard to gain a high-level understanding of the status of the devices in your environment, organized by device type. For a general description of the dashboard, see Introducing the Storage Environment Dashboard.

4	If any of the tiles show that there are devices with the Fatal, Critical, or Warning status, do one of the following: