When I was a System and Storage Administrator, one of the most difficult things was to figure out if my systems were healthy and were they going to be healthy in 6 months. When you're on-call, the last thing you want is to get a call at 2:30 in the morning that your storage system has run out of disk space. This is something that is usually easy to fix, but will ruin your night and could halt production!
There are a lot of great programs out there that will keep an eye on your servers, but what about your storage? Wouldn't it be nice to have a webpage you could log in from anywhere and check the health and capacity of your storage? Something that would show you ALL your Nimble Storage arrays? Wow, I'm starting to sound like those infomercial guys... Act now and you'll get two bottles for the price of one! But I digress...
To answer my infomercial alter ego, YES, this page exists and it's available to you through InfoSight. I've mentioned InfoSight a few times now and showed you some of the features, but I promised to come back and show the features in more detail. Today I'm going to give you a tour of the Wellness and Capacity tabs.
Let's first take a look at the Wellness tab. If you've been a System Administrator, you'll notice the information in the Wellness tab looks a lot like information found in syslog. The nice thing is you don't have to go running around looking for these events, they're right at your finger tips. Let's take a look at the image below. From left to right. The Event Summary shows messages from Urgent, Important to For Review. Each are color coded, you can click on each to focus on those messages or go down the page to see the actual messages. You can select Daily Summary Emails to receive information in your email about what you see here. If you want helpful hints, select the Show hints box and you'll get lots of helpful bubbles that describe what the different features mean on the page. The Event Details tell you what the Event Summary is alerting on.
Now let's look at the Capacity tab. Capacity is really cool because it shows how much you're using on the array and provide predictive analysis on when the array will probably be filled. This is great for future planning! We've all gotten the emails from our boss that ask us what we need to purchase in the next few quarters. With the predictive analysis, this makes it MUCH easier to plan for current and future growth.
Take a look where I've highlighted on the chart. You can select any point and InfoSight will provide you with the information at that time.
I hope this was helpful and if it will help prevent one of those 2:30 in the morning phone calls, than my job is complete! :-)
Until Next Time
-Brain
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