New IOportal feature - Alerts

Monitoring the health status of an enterprise storage array is cumbersome: it requires checking the statistics on a multitude of resources and try to identify irregularities. The Hitachi IOportal offers several tools that enable storage administrators to quickly obtain the most important metrics, by means of the IOportal Dashboard, Cockpit and Capacity views. Nevertheless, it can still happen that important anomalies are overseen and ignored. In the worst case this can lead to incidents with business impact. Ideally, the IOportal should proactively alert the users of significant events and explicitly draw their attention to them. Well, there are good news!

The newest release of Hitachi IOportal introduces alerting! The new alerting functionality informs the IOportal user of all significant events as soon as the user logs in, by displaying appropriately colored banners – one for each alert category. Clicking on the banner forwards the user to the respective detailed view. Furthermore, a new navigation menu, denoted by an exclamation mark, acts as the alert home page and provides further details on each alert. Finally, the user can subscribe to a daily email that summarises all alerts.

Alert Categories

Following alert categories are available in the first incarnation of the feature:

• Pool Capacity Alerts: a warning alert is triggered when the physical or logical pool capacity is above 75%. A risk alert is triggered when the pool utilisation is above 85%.
• HORCM File Delivery Alerts: warning or error alerts are triggered when certain HORCM files have not been delivered or updated during the last 24 hours or 3 days, respectively.
• Export File Delivery Alerts: warning or error alerts are triggered when the last 24 hours, respectively 72 hours, are not covered by export log files.

Outlook

The above alert categories lay the foundation for monitoring a storage array: they comprise pool capacity alerts, which may cause a standstill of operations if they a pool runs full, and file delivery alerts (export and horcm), since we can’t monitor anything if the monitoring log files are not available. Future releases will further build on this powerful feature and provide finer grained and more sophisticated alerts which will increase the value proposition of the IOportal even further! Stay tuned,

Your IOportal team