Use cases

Reporting on Disk Space Consumption

For a granular view of the disk space usage in the disk array, analyze the attributes of the HP 3PAR Storage Pool monitor type:

• The Subscribed Capacity attribute represents the amount of disk space that has been made available to the subscriber hosts, or in other words, the amount of disk space that is seen by the servers connected to the storage system.
• The Consumed Capacity attribute represents the actual space usage in the storage pool. For “thin” pools (when thin provisioning is enabled on the storage system), this value is normally lower than the Subscribed Capacity, as it is the main purpose of thin provisioning. For traditional pools, the Consumed Capacity attribute has the same value as the Subscribed Capacity attribute, as the entirety of the subscribed disk space is fully allocated in the storage pool.
• The Consumed Capacity Percentage attribute is the most critical one, even for non-thin storage pools, as a storage pool usage nearing 100% means that SAN administrators will not be able to create new volumes in the storage pool. By default, no alarm or warning threshold is set on this parameter as the fullness of a storage pool may be a normal situation.

Reclaiming Space of Unused Volumes

Diagnosing a Bad Physical Disk Layout

A non-optimal physical disk layout can cause one single physical disk to become the bottleneck of a SAN. To verify that the amount of data being read/written on a physical disk is well-balanced over time across all physical disks, you need to compare the throughput of read/write data for each physical disk in your HP 3PAR storage systems.

To compare the I/Os of physical disks, you will need to create a dashboard. Dashboards allow you to gather specific types of data and display them in a consolidated graphical format. For detailed information about dashboards options and features, refer to the BMC documentation.

1. Log on to the TrueSight console
2. Select Dashboards from the navigation pane
3. In the Dashboards page, click Add Dashboard or select Add Dashboard from the dashboard action menu
4. Enter a Title for your dashboard and configure a Global Filter, if needed
5. Click Add Dashlet to open the dashlet library for the first column of the row
6. From the dashlet library, select the Device Performance template, and then click Close

   

7. Select Configure Dashlet by clicking the button

   

8. In the panel of input fields and options that opens below the dashboard, enter a Title for the dashlet and specify a Refresh Rate (default is 5 minutes)

9. Select the HP 3PAR storage device for which you need to compare physical disks I/Os

   

10. Select the Read Byte Rate and Write Byte Rate parameters for the first physical disk, and click Apply

    

11. Repeat this operation in the next column(s) of the dashboard with other physical disks and click Save

12. The dashboard is completed and shows the Read Byte Rate and Write Byte Rate parameters for the selected physical disks

    

13. Verify that the Read Byte Rate and Write Byte Rate parameters of all the physical disks have similar average values to ensure that I/Os are well-balanced across all physical disks.

Detecting High Processor Utilization

Detecting a high processor utilization is crucial to prevent nodes to overload and cause critical performance degradations. To detect high processor utilization, you need to compare the actual processor utilization and the overall device throughput to determine which node may constitute a bottleneck.

To compare the utilization of nodes, you will need to create a dashboard. Dashboards allow you to gather specific types of data and display them in a consolidated graphical format. For detailed information about dashboards options and features, refer to the BMC documentation.

To detect high processor utilization:

1. Log on to the TrueSight console
2. Select Dashboards from the navigation pane
3. In the Dashboards page, click Add Dashboard or select Add Dashboard from the dashboard action menu
4. Enter a Title for your dashboard and configure a Global Filter, if needed
5. Click Add Dashlet to open the dashlet library for the first column of the row
6. From the dashlet library, select the Device Performance template, and then click Close
7. Select Configure Dashlet by clicking the button

   

8. In the panel of input fields and options that opens below the dashboard, enter a Title for the dashlet and specify a Refresh Rate (default is 5 minutes)

9. Select the HP 3PAR storage device for which you need to compare the processor utilization of the nodes

   

10. Select the Processor Utilization and Transfer Byte Rate parameters for the first node, and click Apply

    

11. Repeat this operation in the next column(s) of the dashboard with other nodes and click Save

12. The dashboard is completed and shows the Processor Utilization and Transfer Byte Rate for the nodes

    

This dashboard allows you to easily compare the Processor Utilization and Transfer Byte Rate for two nodes. Make sure that the Processor Utilization is lower than 80%. A processor utilization over 80% highlights a potential overloaded situation and indicates that the node may constitute a bottleneck for the storage system.

Verify the Transfer Byte Rate of your nodes. If its value stays low – while the overall processor utilization is high – it indicates that the node is performing “non productive” tasks. It then may become critical to determine the source of activity that generates the high processor utilization.

Diagnosing Slow Volumes

When servers are experiencing slow I/Os performance, you may want to verify the actual response time of the volumes the server is relying on. The response time represents the average time it takes to complete the read/write operations on a volume during the collection interval. Typically, the average response time is below 10 milliseconds. You may also want to compare this value with other volumes response time to find out if they have relatively similar throughput or if one server is really getting worse I/O performance than another.

The industry common guidelines in terms of response time are:

To identify slow volumes, you will need to create a simple dashboard. Dashboards allow you to gather specific types of data and display them in a consolidated graphical format. For detailed information about dashboards options and features, refer to the BMC documentation.

To diagnose slow volumes:

1. Log on to the TrueSight console
2. Select Dashboards from the navigation pane
3. In the Dashboards page, click Add Dashboard or select Add Dashboard from the dashboard action menu
4. Enter a Title for your dashboard and configure a Global Filter, if needed
5. Click Add Dashlet to open the dashlet library for the first column of the row
6. From the dashlet library, select the Device Performance template, and then click Close

   

7. Select Configure Dashlet by clicking the button

   

8. In the panel of input fields and options that opens below the dashboard, enter a Title for the dashlet and specify a Refresh Rate (default is 5 minutes)

9. Select the HP 3PAR storage device for which you need to compare volumes response times

   

10. Select the Response Time parameter for the first volume, and click Apply

    

11. Repeat this operation in the next columns of the dashboard for other volumes and click Save

12. The dashboard is completed and shows the Response Time for all the selected volumes.

    

If the response time is high, you will need to check the amount of data that is written and read on this volume. The bad performance may simply be due to an abnormally large amount of data to process.

Identifying Busiest Volumes

To identify the volumes that generate the most traffic on the disk array, you can use the Read Byte Rate and Write Byte Rate parameters of the HP3P Volume Monitor.

1. Log on to the TrueSight console
2. Select Dashboards from the navigation pane
3. In the Dashboards page, click Add Dashboard or select Add Dashboard from the dashboard action menu
4. Enter a Title for your dashboard and configure a Global Filter, if needed
5. Click Add Dashlet to open the dashlet library for the first column of the row
6. From the dashlet library, select the Monitors - Performance Overview template, and then click Close

   

7. Select Configure Dashlet by clicking the button

   

8. From the Focus list, select Multimetric comparison

9. Select the Monitor Type for which you want to create a graph. In our example, HP 3PAR Volume

   

10. Select the Volumes Monitors to be displayed in the graph and click Done

11. For each selected volume, check the Read Byte Rate and Write Byte Rate parameters and click Apply

    

12. Click Save

13. The dashboard is completed and shows the busiest volumes.

    

Generating Activity Reports

HP 3PAR KM for PATROL can automatically produce text reports that provide detailed and valuable information about your monitored storage systems.

To schedule the generation of activity reports:

1. Edit your HP 3PAR monitoring policy:

   

   • Log on to the TrueSight console.
   • In the navigation pane, expand Configuration and select Infrastructure Policies.
   • In the Infrastructure Policies page, locate the monitoring policy you wish to modify, click its action button and click Edit.
   • In the Edit Monitoring Policy page, locate the HP 3PAR Storage Configuration you wish to modify and click its action button to access the monitoring options panel.

2. Locate the Reporting section:

   

3. In the Schedule section, indicate the time at which the report(s) must be generated

4. Check the Activity report type to automatically generate the following reports:
   • Storage Systems Activity: Reports on Transfer, Received and Sent Bytes for all monitored storage systems
   • Nodes Activity: Reports on Transfer, Read and Write Bytes for all monitored nodes
   • FC, Ethernet, and SAS Ports Activity:Reports on Transfer, Received and Sent Bytes for all monitored fiber ports
   • Storage Pools Activity: Reports on Transfer, Read and Write Bytes for all monitored storage pools
   • Volumes Activity: Reports on Transfer, Read and Write Bytes for all monitored volumes
   • Physical Disks Activity: Reports on Transfer, Read and Write Bytes for all monitored physical disks
5. Click OK
6. Click Save.

The generated file(s) are time-stamped and stored in %PATROL_HOME%\log for the specific time set through the History Retention Period parameter.