SAN monitoring

• Storage array: A collection of HDDs and SSDs to store large volumes of data, managed by a central management system (i.e., a RAID). Storage arrays help distinguish networking functions from data functions and allow multiple servers to access the stored data.
• Storage pool: An aggregation of several physical disks or RAID arrays into a single large storage space. There are three types
  • Primary storage pools: For any user action, the data will be fetched from or modified here. These pools can be arranged in a hierarchy.
  • Copy storage pools: Contain data backed up from the primary storage pool (both active and inactive versions) to protect against unforeseen failures or disasters.
  • Active data pools: Contain only the active data backup versions for faster data restores.

SAN monitoring involves tracking and monitoring devices within the storage network to simplify capacity planning and also take proactive actions for alerts related to the health, performance, and availability of storage devices.

Suppose a single storage device is not running or has reached full capacity. In that case, the user experience might get affected as it takes more time to load an application and store or retrieve data. Here's where SAN monitoring helps.

A SAN monitoring tool alerts you if a device is in trouble or is close to its storage capacity, enabling you to take the appropriate action quickly before the event impairs network operations. Additionally, a SAN monitoring tool like Site24x7 also analyzes capacity trends and helps forecast capacity needs.

Site24x7 provides a unified dashboard with detailed information regarding the storage devices in your network. It also helps with capacity planning by letting you know when your storage devices are approaching full capacity, and it also analyzes consumption trends to accurately predict when you'll need more storage. With proactive alerting and detailed reports that help with analytics, Site24x7 remains the best choice for SAN monitoring.

Storage devices form the backbone of any enterprise, and monitoring them is essential to ensure no unexpected outages. Apart from tracking device status and health, there are many more benefits to having a SAN monitoring tool.

• Detect storage issues quickly: Receive alerts on threshold breaches to act on issues immediately.
• Improve visibility into your storage network: Check how your devices are faring on a single window without having to juggle between multiple screens.
• Save administrative time: Get insightful reports that provide detailed information in your preferred channel, as and when needed.
• Cut overhead costs: Receive alerts that let you know about an issue before it becomes a significant problem, thereby saving the cost of downtime.
• Cut overhead costs: Receive alerts that let you know about an issue before it becomes a significant problem, thereby saving the cost of downtime.
• Streamline capacity planning: View capacity forecasts for well-informed planning and prudent purchases based on past consumption rates.
• Get reports anytime: Generate reports based on parameters like growth trend, storage summary, RAID latency, and capacity utilization.

A SAN is a collection of storage devices and computers connected over high-speed cables that stores and protects your organization's data. When you use a separate network for storage, activities such as data transfer, backup, restoration, archival, and retrieval become faster, giving you an edge over competitors and helping you deliver fabulous user experiences. To ensure that your storage network continues to deliver top-notch experiences, you must monitor your SANs.

Site24x7's cloud-based SAN monitoring involves the following steps:

• The On-Premise Poller, a lightweight agent that helps monitor your internal and external networks, collects relevant metrics.
• The metrics collected show the device performance with respect to availability, health, latency, read and write speed, IOPS, and drive and disk count.
• Some other vital metrics tracked are the volume and capacity of the storage pool—free, used, and remaining.
• Site24x7 sends an alert to your preferred channel when the storage capacity breaches a threshold.