Analyzing data in the dashboard

Analyzing data shown in alert tiles

The alert tiles collectively present the health of the storage system environment. With a quick view, you can verify that the overall health is sound if you see no alerts on the alert tiles. No alerts indicates that there are no capacity or hardware issues in the environment, no failed jobs in the last 24 hours, and that the data protection is working without any issues.

If there are any alerts, you can drill down to the relevant alert window to investigate the cause. Ops Center Administrator has alerts for capacity utilization, hardware, data protection, and jobs status for block storage.

Analyzing data in the information gauge

The information gauge gives a visual indication of the total capacity of all storage systems managed by Ops Center Administrator.

The capacity indicated in the center of the ring is the total usable capacity available as indicated by the configured parity groups for block storage and drives for Software Defined Storage. After you add a storage system and configure parity groups for block storage or pools for Software Defined Storage, the total capacity indicator shows the capacity from the newly added storage system. The Thin Used capacity (light green ring) indicates the total capacity that is currently being used. If the usage is around 70-80% of the total capacity, you might receive capacity alerts based on the thresholds set by your storage administrator for block storage. The default thresholds are 70% and 80% and can be changed during pool creation.

The light gray ring that gives a sum of capacities of all pools in the systems should be closer to 100% capacity. This means that you are using your entire parity group capacity for block storage and drive capacity for Software Defined Storage by allocating it to pools. If the Thin Used capacity ring (light green) nears the total capacity (light gray ring) then you might run out of pool capacity soon. In this case, expand the pool to consume more capacity.

If you notice that the total pool capacity (light gray ring) and Thin used (light green ring) values are getting closer to total capacity, you might be running out of disk capacity on one or more storage systems and would need to add disk space to increase storage capacity. Before adding disk space:

• Review the information gauge for each storage system to identify which storage system needs additional capacity.
• Review unused disks for each storage system to determine if any raw unused capacity is available for parity group creation in block storage and for storage pool expansion in Software Defined Storage.

Capacity subscription beyond the total available capacity should not be an issue if your thin capacity utilization is well within the total capacity.

Analyzing tier metrics

As parity groups are created, the various disk types become categorized into tiers. The tiers and corresponding disk types are as follows for block storage.

Analyzing data protection metrics

The balance of your protected primary volumes and secondary volumes depends on the number of copies you chose to maintain and on the type of the data protection technology being used. If you set aside more volumes for data protection, the overall usable capacity might be affected. However, if you have a large amount of unprotected data, you should consider data protection options.