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Product overview

With Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer, you can define and monitor storage service-level objectives (SLOs) for resource performance. You can identify and analyze historical performance trends to optimize storage system performance and plan for capacity growth.

Using Ops Center Analyzer, you register resources (storage systems, hosts, servers, and volumes) and set service-level thresholds. You are alerted to threshold violations and possible performance problems (bottlenecks). Using analytics tools, you find which resource has a problem and analyze its cause to help solve the problem.

The following figure shows how Ops Center Analyzer ensures the performance of your storage environment based on real-time SLOs.

The figure shows how Ops Center Analyzer ensures the performance of your storage environment based on real-time SLOs.

The system administrator uses Ops Center Analyzer to manage and monitor the IT infrastructure based on SLOs, which match the service-implementation guidelines that are negotiated under a service-level agreement (SLA) with consumers.

Ops Center Analyzer monitors the health of the IT infrastructure using performance indicators and generates alerts when SLOs are at risk.

Having data center expertise, the service administrator uses Ops Center Analyzer to assign resources, such as VMs and storage capacity from registered storage systems, to consumer applications. This manages critical SLO violations and ensures that service performance meets the SLAs.

Features of Ops Center Analyzer

Ops Center Analyzer provides IT analytics capabilities and business benefits.

Unified infrastructure monitoring dashboard

Ops Center Analyzer dashboards are visual representations of the performance metrics of your infrastructure resources. The consolidated view allows you to quickly interpret the performance metrics and identify performance problems.

The consolidated dashboard view allows for the unified management of the server, storage, and network infrastructure resources. You can ensure the health of your data center by proactively monitoring the consumer groups, storage components, volumes, VMs, servers, and network devices. The advanced visual analytics aid in visualizing the performance data in easy-to-use graphs and charts. The visual cues allow for intuitive performance management.

A screenshot of Ops Center Analyzer Dashboard

The functions of the Ops Center Analyzer dashboard are as follows:

  • Displays performance metrics summaries for the monitored resources.
  • Displays warnings and critical alerts that need immediate action.
  • Displays performance trends.
  • Allows you to drill down from summary reports to detailed reports.
  • Provides the ability to navigate to the E2E topology view for detailed analysis.

Advanced reporting

Ops Center Analyzer reporting capabilities enable you to monitor the infrastructure resources and assess their current performance, capacity, and utilization. Reporting data provides you the information you need to make informed business decisions and plan for future growth.

Ops Center Analyzer supports both standard and custom reporting capabilities.

In-depth reporting

Standard reports

  • Default reportsThe first time you log on to Ops Center Analyzer, the dashboard shows the following reports by default: System Status Summary for Consumers and User Resources, Event Trends, System Resource Status, and Resource Events. You can customize which reports display by default.
  • Critical reportsCritical reports show resources in your storage infrastructure that have exceeded their thresholds. Critical reports are available for consumers, VMs, volumes, hosts, and system resources.
  • Summary reportsSummary reports give you a high-level view of storage infrastructure resources. These reports are available for consumers, VMs, volumes, and system resources. Each summary report shows the number of resources with critical and warning alerts.
  • Capacity reports Capacity reports give you a measure of the capacity consumption of your data center resources and enable you to optimize the capacity usage of the existing storage resources. By monitoring the capacity reports you can forecast future capacity requirements of your data center.
  • Other reports Ops Center Analyzer provides additional reports about hypervisors, switches, and system and resource events.

Custom reports

Ops Center Analyzersupports creating custom reports by running queries or by using an existing template for monitoring capacity and configuration data. You can also access the report builder from the Analyzer detail view UI to build custom reports for monitoring performance data.

In-context launch of Analyzer detail view Reports

You can access Analyzer detail view reports at any time directly from the E2E View. Simply click any resource icon and select Show Report in Analyzer detail view.

SLO management

SLOs are measurable parameters that are defined for monitoring the performance of user resources. With Ops Center Analyzer, you can evaluate, define, and customize the service-level objectives defined for the monitored resources such as volumes and VMs. By monitoring the SLOs, you can determine whether your infrastructure provides enough performance to meet the end user requirements specified in the service-level agreement.

Ops Center Analyzer lets you establish and monitor storage service-level objectives for business-critical applications and logical storage devices. When a service-level threshold is exceeded, integrated diagnostics facilitate in identifying the root cause. For storage operations, you can use the I/O control settings feature to set upper limits as a long-term solution across a range of users by consumer grade based on an SLO.

End-to-end monitoring

The E2E topology view provides detailed configuration of the infrastructure resources and lets you view the relationship between the infrastructure components. You can manually analyze the dependencies between the components in your environment and identify the resource causing performance problems. By using the topology maps, you can easily monitor and manage your resources. You can use this view to monitor resources in your data center: applications, virtual machines, servers, networks, and storage.

In the E2E view, each node represents a resource, and the connecting links represent the relationship between the infrastructure components. You can analyze a resource that is the target of analysis and all the associated resources. You can also view the alerts associated with all the related resources and trace the problem at the root level. The node-based E2E view helps you analyze the problem on the affected node and its impact on the rest of the infrastructure resources.

Problem identification and root cause analysis

Performance problems might occur because of varying system loads, applications updates, capacity upgrades, configuration changes, and inefficient management of resources in the shared infrastructure.

The Ops Center Analyzer advanced diagnostic engine aids in rapidly diagnosing, troubleshooting, and finding the root cause of performance bottlenecks.

Storage I/O controls

Storage I/O controls allow you to set and modify limits on volumes.

In the Data Center, some types of resources often require higher performance than others. For example, production servers such as database and application servers used to perform daily tasks of business organizations usually require high performance. However, if production servers experience decreased performance, productivity in business activities is negatively affected.

To prevent this from happening, the storage administrator needs to maintain the high performance of production servers. A drop in development server performance does not have as much of a negative effect on the entire organization as a drop in production server performance. In this case, you set upper limits to give higher priority to I/O activity from the production server over I/O activity from the development server to manage and control the impact of development activities.

Storage I/O controls are available in Ops Center Analyzer when Server Priority Manager is installed on your storage systems. You can invoke this function through Ops Center Automator after establishing a connection between the two servers. Alternatively, if Ops Center Automator is not installed on your storage system, you can use the CM REST API to create a script, which serves as a template that you modify for selected volumes to run the Server Priority Manager operation.

Using the I/O control setting, you can enable upper limits for the storage I/O activity of volumes that belong to consumers. The storage administrator clears the I/O control setting when the traffic between the server and storage system drops to acceptable levels. Furthermore, you have the option of limiting the data transfer rate on volumes affecting critical resources.

Set I/O control limits for the following:

  • To achieve overall optimization of infrastructure resources during periods of I/O-intensive activity
  • To maintain a quality-of-service benchmark for an SLO
  • To prioritize I/O activity to optimize performance

Hitachi Ops Center Automator integration

Ops Center Analyzer supports integration with Ops Center Automator.

This support allows users to directly access the service templates in Ops Center Automator from the Execute Action window in the Ops Center Analyzer UI. When you notice a performance problem in your shared infrastructure, you can run the appropriate action or service template to resolve it.

Risk management capability

Ops Center Analyzer allows users to analyze trend projections in their infrastructure through predictive analytics risk reporting.

  • Near-term trending Define target metrics and predict performance over time to understand utilization trends.
  • Capacity planning View long-term capacity projections to plan resource allocation.
NoteThe predictive analytics risk reporting capability is a licensed feature. Consult your Hitachi Vantara representative to obtain a license.