Comprehensive Storage Monitoring
High-performance storage networks are becoming more prevalent in all business data-centers, from SMBs to large enterprises. Storage-attached-network (SAN), Network-attached-storage (NAS) and other high-performance and intelligent storage management systems from EMC, NetApp and other storage vendors are critical to data-center operations. PHD Virtual Monitor provides several features for monitoring performance and operation of these storage systems and for integrating their status and alerting into PHD Virtual Monitor's various consolidated, real-time dashboard displays and comprehensive reporting.
Monitoring Virtual Storage
Administrators have an ever increasing challenge to understand how the storage solutions attached to their VMWare ESX/ESXi & Citrix XenServer hosts are being utilized. PHD Virtual Monitor has the ability to give administrators visibility into the storage infrastructure to show overall availability of space, usage over time, and how the space is being consumed. This allows administrators to make decisions on where they may be able to reclaim space, prevent running out of space due to unchecked storage consumption, and gain visibility into how much space snapshots may be using.
Specific Features of Monitoring Virtual Storage
- Gain visibility how Virtual Disks, Snapshots, Templates, Orphaned VMs, and more are consuming space
- Trend utilization over time with our capacity trend graphs
- Quickly correlate between virtual space allocated, physical space consumed, and free space
- Correlation of virtual disks and snapshots to their respective virtual machines, with provisioned and current physical size on disk
Monitoring Physical Storage
Specific Features of Monitoring the Physical Storage
CounterWatch for SNMP: Real-Time SNMP Query Monitoring
PHD Virtual Monitor's CounterWatch for SNMP proactively polls to monitor any select SNMP Counters that are derived via the storage device MIBs. The PHD Virtual Monitor Server component provides the SNMP CounterWatch polling by default but additional flexibility and control is possible by designating one or more deployed PHD Virtual Monitor Windows Agents to act as distributed SNMP CounterWatch polling monitor that forwards the SNMP CounterWatch data to the PHD Virtual Monitor Server via the Agent connection.
You can optionally have PHD Virtual Monitor use this comprehensive SNMP CounterWatch performance data to trigger alerts if specified thresholds are exceeded, and you can generate consolidated performance reports, or dynamic graphs. There is an option to export the raw graph data to a CSV file, which can be viewed and processed by Microsoft Excel.
Create your own custom SNMP CounterWatch report collection set/templates to monitor, analyze, troubleshoot/diagnose, and report, and make recommendations for improving performance and for solving operational problems. All SNMP CounterWatch data is logged to PHD Virtual Monitor's Access or SQL Server database, giving you centralized control of all the monitoring results, and providing baseline and trending data.
SNMP TrapWatch: Real-Time SNMP Trap Monitoring
PHD Virtual Monitor's SNMP TrapWatch monitors your SNMP enabled storage devices for SNMP Traps. You specify the SNMP Traps that are monitored and the acceptable storage devices where they can originate. Optionally define alert notifications that are executed upon receipt of specific SNMP Traps. Review the history of all or selected SNMP Traps received in the PHD Virtual Monitor "Alert Notifications" report.
There is a MIB parsing feature to extract and make available the SNMP Trap OIDs from your storage MIBs, provided by the storage vendor, to make it simple to define the Watches for SNMP Traps. Use the SNMPTrapWatch Display feature to view received, monitored Traps dynamically as they occur, and to display up to the previous 24 hours of previously received, monitored Traps.
Similar to the SNMP CounterWatch monitoring, there is an option to designate one or more Agents to act as remote distributed SNMP Trap monitors. Traps that match your defined watches are forwarded on to the PHD Virtual Monitor Server over the existing Agent connection for logging to the database and any alert notification processing.
SYSLOGWatch: Real-Time SYSLOG Monitoring
PHD Virtual Monitor's SYSLOGWatch monitors SYSLOG messages transmitted from your selected storage devices. The PHD Virtual Monitor Server listens on the standard SYSLOG UDP port for these messages and processes them according to your specified SYSLOG Watch/Alerts. You can be alerted when selected SYSLOG messages are received, and you can use SYSLOGWatch to centralize your SYSLOG collection, management and reporting. Review the history of all or selected SYSLOG messages received in the PHD Virtual Monitor "Alert Notifications" report. Use the SYSLOGWatch Display feature to view received, monitored SYSLOG messages dynamically as they occur, and to display up to the previous 24 hours of previously received, monitored SYSLOG messages.
There is an option to designate one or more PHD Virtual Monitor Agents as remote, distributed Syslog collectors/servers. Agents so designated will forward Syslog messages to the PHD Virtual Monitor Server over the encrypted Agent connection for logging and alert notification processing, depending on your SyslogWatch rules.
