EMC Monitoring

Overview

Nagios offers comprehensive monitoring solutions for EMC storage systems, ensuring the health and performance of your storage infrastructure. It provides detailed monitoring of EMC CLARiiON SAN devices, including free space, storage processor health, disk status, cache status, faults, and port and HBA states. By continuously tracking these critical parameters, Nagios helps in identifying potential issues before they escalate into significant problems.

With Nagios, you can monitor the overall health of your EMC storage systems, receive alerts for any anomalies, and take proactive measures to maintain optimal performance. This includes monitoring the status of storage processors, detecting disk failures, and ensuring that cache and RAID arrays are functioning correctly. Additionally, Nagios supports custom monitoring configurations, allowing you to tailor the monitoring to meet the specific needs of your EMC environment. Its extensive plugin architecture further enhances its capabilities, enabling the monitoring of virtually any aspect of your EMC storage systems, providing a versatile and scalable solution for storage management.

Key Features

1. Storage Processor Monitoring: Track the status and performance of storage processors, including busy percentages and detailed information such as SP ID, firmware versions, and memory.
2. Disk Status Monitoring: Monitor the health and status of physical disks within the EMC storage system.
3. Cache Monitoring: Keep an eye on the read and write cache status, including the percentage of dirty pages in the cache.
4. Fault Detection: Detect and report any faults within the storage system to prevent data loss and downtime.
5. Port and HBA State Monitoring: Monitor the status of ports and host bus adapters (HBAs) to ensure connectivity and performance.
6. LUN and RAID Group Monitoring: Check the status of Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) and RAID groups, including free space, RAID type, and rebuild percentages.

Benefits

• Increased Availability: Ensure higher availability of servers, services, and applications by monitoring critical storage components.
• Fast Detection of Issues: Quickly identify and address storage subsystem problems to minimize downtime.
• Proactive Maintenance: Implement proactive maintenance strategies by monitoring key metrics and trends.

Tools and Plugins

• EMC CLARiiON Monitoring Wizard: This wizard simplifies the setup process for monitoring EMC CLARiiON SAN devices, allowing you to configure monitoring for storage processors, disks, cache, faults, ports, HBAs, LUNs, and RAID groups.
• check_emc_clariion Plugin: A modified plugin that provides detailed monitoring capabilities for EMC CLARiiON systems.

Implementation

Nagios offers various plugins and configuration wizards to facilitate EMC monitoring. For example, the EMC CLARiiON Monitoring Wizard helps you set up monitoring for different components of the SAN, providing detailed performance data and alerts for any issues detected.

Use Cases

• System Administrators: Monitor the health and performance of EMC storage systems to ensure data integrity and availability.
• IT Operations: Implement proactive monitoring to prevent storage-related issues and ensure compliance with data retention policies.
• Data Center Managers: Optimize storage infrastructure by monitoring key metrics and planning capacity upgrades.