VNX Monitoring and Reporting 1.1 Released

For the customers I talk to as part of my regular travels, a frequent request by EMC midrange customers using CX or VNX is an easier way to get high-level performance metrics out of their SAN. For folks who only have a single storage array in their environment, they typically don’t login on a regular basis as they have many hats to wear and a high-quality SAN tends to be somewhat “set it and forget it”. Although the built-in Analyzer tool is extremely thorough, if you don’t use it regularly it can be a bit cumbersome. The good news here is EMC released a product a few months back called VNX Monitoring & Reporting (M&R). This tool is an EXTREMELY cost-effective product that provides the user with an easy to use dashboard with a ton of reports yielding info on array performance (file and block). It is backwards compatible and supported on CX4-based platforms. I’ve even had one customer make it work with a CX3, though that is not supported.

Now, for some of my customers who had M&R and were also savvy with Analyzer, they were noticing a few anomalies in the data reporting between the two products. Those of you who have experienced this will want to upgrade to 1.1 whenever it is convenient.

See below for all the new features of VNX M&R 1.1, and don’t forget you can download the product from support.emc.com and run for 30 days in trial mode. It’s not documented in the download package, so as a tip the default password is admin/changeme. The install is a very straightforward Windows install (i.e. Next, Next, Next, Finish). Then plug in the IP’s of your array and you’re good to go.

Also, for VMware-EMC customers, don’t forget the EMC vCenter plug-in’s. Specifically, the EMC Storage Viewer plugin offers high-level real time reporting on array performance, but there is no historical reporting.

see https://support.emc.com/products/28885_VNX-Monitoring-&-Reporting

Chargeback
Beginning with this release, a new Data Enrichment feature called
Chargeback is available. Chargeback calculates cost-of-service for
business units and applications in an organization and displays it
in the Chargeback reports. The VNX Monitoring and Reporting
Administrator assigns a cost-per-gigabyte value to LUNs by RAID
type, tier, and array model. Specific LUNs are then associated with
a business unit and application. Total cost-per-gigabyte for each
business unit and application is calculated based on this
configuration

Heat Map Reports
Heat map reports are now available in this release. A heat map is a
grid in which metrics that have similar values are grouped together
in order to create “hot” and “cold” areas. These values will be
colored according to predefined thresholds. Unlike other types of
reports, visual thresholds for Heat maps cannot be adjusted.

Scheduled Reports
Reports can now be scheduled to run at specific times and be
delivered as PDFs to selected recipients through email. Whenever a
report is scheduled to be generated, it queries the database for the
latest data.

Alerts
Alerts are now available and can be configured to trigger an email
or be captured in an SNMP trap based on when certain
performance thresholds are violated. For example, an Alert can be
configured to trigger whenever storage processor utilization
exceeds 75%. Alerts can also be configured to trigger only for
specific components, such as specific SPs on specific systems. The
Alert email recipients are configurable by alert.

There are six pre-defined alerts available with this release:
• Data Mover Processor Utilization (%)
• File System Percent Subscribed (%)
• LUN Response Time (milliseconds)
• Storage Pool Percent Subscribed (%)
• Storage Processor Dirty Pages Utilization (%)
• Storage Processor Utilization (%)