How does eG Enterprise monitor the Hitachi VSP storage device?

eG Enterprise monitors the Hitachi VSP storage device using an external agent that can be deployed on any remote host in the environment. This agent runs a variety of tests which report useful performance statistics related to the storage device. These tests use both the following approaches to collecting metrics from the Hitachi VSP device:

• By accessing the Performance Monitor application available with the storage device;
• Using SNMP-based access to the SNMP MIB of the device;

The Performance Monitor is a controller-based software application that acquires information on the performance of RAID groups, logical units, and other elements of the disk subsystem while tracking the utilization rates of resources such as hard disk drives and processors. To periodically run the Performance Monitor application and to extract the metrics of interest from the storage device, a Java export utility must be available on the eG agent host.

The tests that need to access the Performance Monitor for metrics should then be configured with the path to the Java export utility. This way, whenever that test is run, the eG agent executing the test automatically invokes the Java export utility via CLI, which then connects to the storage device, accesses the Performance Monitor on the device, and extracts the desired metrics.

A few other tests executed by the eG agent collects the statistics of interest using SNMP-based access to the MIB statistics of the storage device. For these tests to work, you first need to SNMP-enable the storage device.

While you need to configure a remote agent for accessing the Performance Monitor software and collecting metrics, an external agent is necessary for performing the SNMP-based monitoring.

Note:

If need be, you can configure a single agent to function both as a remote agent as well as an external agent for monitoring the Hitachi VSP.