SAN Performance Monitoring

How does SAN performance monitoring work in SRM?

SolarWinds Storage Resource Manager (SRM) is a powerful, user-friendly solution for your SAN performance monitoring needs. Designed to provide end-to-end, unified storage monitoring, SRM offers an extensive view of your organization's data storage health. Using SRM helps simplify monitoring across various enterprise SAN storage vendors and helps enable you to make informed decisions, troubleshoot issues, and optimize storage infrastructure performance.

SRM uses a primary poller to poll and retrieve data from your storage device and additional pollers to gather data from other locations.

SAN systems monitoring is easy with the user-friendly dashboards in SRM designed to provide performance metrics for your SAN across storage vendors, such as IBM, Nimble, Dell, Hitachi, and HPE storage arrays. SRM SAN tools offer the ability to cross-stack IT systems and data, view your entire SAN infrastructure, and receive alerts when a critical threshold is passed, providing you with deeper insight into performance issues and better enabling you to quickly isolate their root cause. SRM also helps users monitor their hardware under the Hardware Health tab.

As a SAN performance monitoring tool, SRM is built to offer access to growth trends and forecasted views, which helps simplify the storage capacity planning process. Thanks to these valuable insights and up-to-date data, you’ll know when it’s time to upgrade your storage capacity and more effectively plan resource expansion and reallocation.

SAN monitoring and SAN reporting is designed to be easier with SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor. With a fast setup, intuitive interface, and detailed reports, you can reduce unexpected downtime.

What is a SAN?

A storage area network, or a SAN, is a powerful network-based storage solution that allows servers to securely access shared pools of storage and data on a block level. With RAID (Redundancy Array of Independent Disks) technology, a SAN provides high data security and redundancy and offers a centralized location for storage, making it easier to monitor, secure, and manage than other storage solutions with isolated storage capacities.

Organizations use SANs to efficiently and securely manage and allocate storage resources. Using a SAN can improve application performance and availability because SANs separate administrative traffic from other traffic on your LAN.

These high-speed, independent networks are composed of a storage-plumbing tier that connects nodes and delivers device-oriented commands and a software tier. SANs contain multiple interconnected elements (often via Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, (CoE), Internet Small Computing System Interface (ISCI), or Infiniband), including:

• Hosts: When accessing data stored on a SAN from a host, the SAN usually appears as a disk to end users.
• Switches: Designed for high-performance networks, SAN switches are responsible for moving storage traffic within a SAN. These devices are attached to storage arrays and servers, facilitating the movement of storage traffic, and minimizing network latency and data loss. 
• Storage Devices: SAN data may be stored in several hard disks. However, SAN hard disks may be joined through a RAID, allowing them to act as a single storage device. Having a quality RAID monitoring tool can help you effectively troubleshoot your RAID groups and storage pools. You can also view RAID group storage space consumption with a RAID monitoring tool.

Why is SAN infrastructure monitoring important?

SAN performance monitoring provides a unified view of the health, performance, and capacity of multiple SAN devices in a data center, helping you minimize hardware malfunctions, network disruptions, and data loss. SAN devices monitoring also provides storage alerts and reports that you can leverage to improve the efficiency of SAN devices.

A storage area network monitoring software can provide you with up-to-date information about your storage hardware and its performance. With a powerful SAN monitoring tool, you can:

• Run reports: With the help of detailed reports, you can gain a thorough understanding of your SAN infrastructure, view SAN capacity and performance metrics, get the info you need to resolve SAN performance issues quickly, and share critical data with other parties. Scheduling automated reports with SAN server monitoring software helps you streamline the process.
• Gain a deeper understanding of sensor performance: A SAN monitoring tool can also provide statuses, values, and statistics for your sensors, giving you a better idea of their performance over time. With SAN server monitoring software, you can troubleshoot server performance issues as they arise, helping to reduce downtime.
• Get alerts: In addition to collecting metrics, a SAN devices monitoring tool can alert you when critical thresholds are crossed, allowing you to act immediately. Storage area network monitoring software is built to alert you when a storage array is running out of space or when device latency has passed a predefined threshold so you can quickly make any necessary changes. 
• Make data-driven storage decisions: As you’re changing or creating underlying storage infrastructure for applications, you’ll need to know which elements are responsible for slowdowns and keep capacity and performance requirements in mind. This means knowing how much storage you need, how many I/O operations per second your network performs, and what your read/write ratio and expected I/O size are. Investing in SAN tools and consistently performing SAN infrastructure monitoring can give you this information, allowing you to make data-driven storage decisions.

Investing in a quality SAN infrastructure monitoring and devices monitoring tool can give you the insights and tools to help you better control SAN performance. With a SAN systems monitoring tool, you can more easily minimize downtime, reduce data loss, expand infrastructure, and make data-driven decisions.