The guys at CloudPhysics have been busy behind the scenes of late working on improving an already great Analytic and Monitoring platform and recently I was able to preview a new enhanced set of Storage Analytic Cards. These cards are currently in Preview and with an official write up here by @esxtopGuru Which goes through the different cards on offer.

Coming from Service Provider land, I am always extremely interested in being able to find out how my datastores are performing and which VMs are causing or have caused trouble…I am also interested in SnapShots and if any have the potential to do harm on our platform. In this post i’ll be going through the Datastore Contention v2 Card…followed by Part 2 which will go through the Snapshots Gone Wild v2 Card.

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Below is the new interface to the Datastore Contention v2 Card and you can see off the bat that there is a lot more going when compared to the v1 Cards…

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The initial Card View will show you Datastores across your environment that need Attention and those that are of interest. This is based on an algorithm that CloudPhysics have created that dictates acceptable levels of contention on VMs on datastores. You will get an overview of Throughput, IOPS and Latency metrics as well as total VMs and how many are potentially affected by storage contention.

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While the actual metrics haven’t changed here from the v1 Card the way in which you can manipulate the data has been enhanced. For a period going back the lat 24 hours (It would be nice to go back further…something I’ve mentioned as a feature request) you can dynamically change the graph to display Bandwidth, Latency, IOPS, Outstanding IOs and choose to display Average, Read and/or Write Values.

As you click on the Active Red Zones in the Graph the list of Culprit VMs and Victim VMs changes to match the time period. [UPDATED] You now have a side by side view of Culprit VMs and Victim VMs giving quick and easy access to affected instances…By Clicking on the Blue View Details Button you can further drill down into the list and view VM specific storage metrics for that period as shown below.

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You also now have the ability to export each graph in a variety of usable formats which is excellent for reporting purposes. In fact exporting has been enabled at all levels and you can export to CSV the entire Card View of data by clicking on the ALL Tab that lists all datastores in your environment. As a side note…the left hand search menu drop box sorting has been added to by a dynamic search bar which allows you to search for datastores…it even takes regular expression for those that are that way inclined!

Heading back to the top of the Card View you get an overall Aggregate picture of the currently selected datastores in the main presentation area…this dynamically adjusts based on what datastore(s) are in focus at the time.

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Wrapping Part 1 up the new Datastore Contention card is brilliant…not only does it better give you access to potential problem datastores and VMs but it’s able to let you visualize and export data quickly and efficiently…The enhancements in the visual representation of data shows that the guys at CloudPhysics are looking at more dynamic style of data view which makes the overall experience and usability that much more enhanced.

http://blog.cloudphysics.com/blog/whos-minding-your-storage-zoo

http://blog.cloudphysics.com/blog/2014/4/7/noisy-neighbor-where-art-thou-performance-culprit-and-victim-analysis-using-cloudphysics-storage-analytics