How to monitor your storage environment in 4 steps

Plan your storage monitoring

First of all, think about what monitoring your individual storage stack implies. Usually, monitoring a storage environment does not mean that you only monitor aspects like the health status and free space of physical and logical disks or volumes. Data storage also needs a reliable underlying hardware system, and the available bandwidth plays an important role for the performance of a storage system as well.

Therefore, you should ask yourself:

• Which layers of my storage environment do I want to monitor?
• Does my storage system use SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) or does it have a REST (Representational State Transfer) API (application programming interface) that I can use to set up my monitoring?
• Are there already some native sensors in PRTG for monitoring my specific storage system?
• Can I use vendor MIB (Management Information Base) files to create custom sensors with which I can monitor even more values than with only the native sensors?

In the following sections, we want to show you an example setup for monitoring a Dell EMC Unity storage system with our new native Dell EMC Unity sensors via the REST API.

Of course, PRTG also offers native sensors for other leading manufacturers such as NetApp, QNAP, Synology, HPE, Nutanix, Lenovo, or Buffalo, and some WMI sensors for monitoring your Windows storage. For an overview of storage sensors, see the PRTG Manual: List of Available Sensor Types. You can also find scripts for custom sensors in the PRTG Sensor Hub.

Set up the device tree

1. To get a structured overview of your storage system, create a group called Storage, for example. Click the plus icon and select Add Group to create a new group.
2. Create a subgroup with the name of your storage system, for example, Dell EMC Unity.
3. To this subgroup, add the devices you need for your storage monitoring and structure them according to the different monitoring layers. To add a device, right-click the subgroup name and select Add Device from the context menu. 
   In this case, we added the devices System, Disk Enclosures, Storage Capacity, Storage Pool, Storage LUNs, and File Systems.

Did you know that you can choose from various vendor device icons to enhance your device’s visualization in the device tree? Just choose a suitable device icon in the Add Device dialog.

4. Now you can add the sensors you need. To add a sensor to a device, right-click the device name and select Add Sensor from the context menu. We chose the following sensors:

a) Dell EMC Unity Enclosure Health v2 sensor: This sensor monitors the DAE (disk-array enclosure) health or the health of a virtual or physical DPE (disk processor enclosure). It can show, for example, the overall health status, the status of cooling modules, drives, storage processors, power supplies, or the temperature of a storage enclosure.

b) Dell EMC Unity Storage Capacity v2 sensor: This sensor can show the free size, the allocated size, the subscribed size, and the used size of the storage system in percent and bytes.

c) Dell EMC Unity Storage Pool v2 sensor: This sensor can show the overall health status of a storage pool, the free size, the metadata size (used and subscribed), the preallocated size, the snapshot size (used and subscribed), the subscribed size, and the used size in percent and bytes.

d) Dell EMC Unity Storage LUN v2 sensor: This sensor can show the overall health status of a storage LUN, the allocated size, the allocated metadata size, and the used and allocated snapshot size.

e) Dell EMC Unity File System v2 sensor: This sensor can show the free size in percent and bytes, the allocated size, the snapshot count, and the used snapshot size of a file system.

Are you missing a sensor to monitor, for example, the I/O performance of your Dell EMC Unity storage system? Stay tuned for further upcoming native sensors!