Monitoring the EMC Isilon Storage System

eG Enterprise offers a specialized EMC Isilon Storage monitoring model that monitors the core functions and components of the Isilon storage system, and proactively alerts administrators to issues in its overall performance and its critical operations, so that the holes are plugged before any data loss occurs.

Figure 1 : The layer model of the EMC Isilon storage system

Every layer of the layer model is mapped to a wide variety of tests that monitor critical performance parameters such as processing ability, load, and state, of the core components of the storage system. To pull out such useful performance data from the storage system, the eG agent needs to be deployed on a remote Windows host in the environment and configured to poll the SNMP MIB and run CLI commands via SSH port of the storage system at set intervals. To know how to configure the eG agent to collect performance metrics from the storage system, refer to How to Monitor EMC Isilon Storage System Using eG Enterprise ?. Once the pre-requisites discussed are fulfilled, the eG agent will extract useful statistics from the storage system and report it to the eG manager. 

Using these metrics, the following critical performance queries can be answered:

  • What is the status of storage cluster and nodes?
  • What is the total capacity and space utilization of nodes and cluster?
  • How much data was utilized for performing read/write operations on the disk?
  • Is any disk on the node overloaded with I/O requests?
  • What is the current temperature and voltage of each node?
  • What is the current speed of the fans on each node?
  • How well I/O operations were performed through each protocol?
  • Which protocol was transferring maximum data?
  • What is the throughput of the cluster and nodes?
  • Is any node overloaded with I/O requests?
  • Is load uniformly distributed across disks?
  • Is any storage processor in a faulty state now?
  • Is any storage processor overloaded?
  • What is the current status of the storage pool?
  • How well the storage pool was utilized?