Reporting in Vipr Srm

ASKING THE HARD QUESTIONS: REPORTING IN VIPR SRM Daniel Stafford Tiffany Stafford Advisory Systems Engineer [email protected] EMC (Illustrations) [email protected] (Words and figures) Table of Contents Introduction: What is a Hard Question? ...................................................................................... 4 Automating the Answers ......................................................................................................... 5 About this Article .................................................................................................................... 6 Basic Search Skills and the Data Model ..................................................................................... 8 Metric Search ......................................................................................................................... 8 Property Search ..................................................................................................................... 9 Notes on the ViPR SRM Data Model .....................................................................................10 Why is Metric and Property Searching a Foundational Skill? .................................................10 Building a Table with a Simple Expansion .................................................................................11 More on Simple Expansions ..................................................................................................14 Adding Related Disks ................................................................................................................16 Adding Physical Hosts and Disk Capacity .................................................................................19 The Basics of Time Management ..........................................................................................22 Recipes for Success: Common Time Management Configurations .......................................24 Adding Disk Capacity ............................................................................................................25 Recipes for Success: Common Complex Expansions ...........................................................28 Configuring the Expansion for Physical Hosts .......................................................................30 Configuring the Expansion for Virtual Machines ....................................................................31 Data Enrichment .......................................................................................................................36 Registering a Collector ..........................................................................................................36 Configuring a Tag Set ............................................................................................................37 Saving a Tag Set ...................................................................................................................39 Checking for Updates ............................................................................................................40 Using Data Enrichment for Application Chargeback ..................................................................42 Alerting on Reports ...................................................................................................................45 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2 Building the Report ................................................................................................................46 Scheduling the Report ...........................................................................................................46 Configuring the Alert ..............................................................................................................47 Notes on the Report Data Adapter .....................................................................................47 The Alerting Definition ........................................................................................................48 Automating the Policy Change ..............................................................................................49 Testing Port Deregistration ....................................................................................................51 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................52 Disclaimer: The views, processes or methodologies published in this article are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect EMC Corporation’s views, processes or methodologies. 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 3 Introduction: What is a Hard Question? Most enterprise information technology products have some sort of built-in reporting capability. In storage arrays this might be something like Unisphere® for VMAX® or Isilon® InsightIQ. VMware vCenter natively shows statistics about a VMware environment. Oracle has Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) and Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM). The common thread among these tools is that they were written with the intent of reporting on a specific product or system. This initial architectural decision introduces some inherent limitations into their capabilities. For instance, it may be difficult to ask questions that involve long time periods. It may be difficult to scale to report on a large number of the target systems in a unified way. Most importantly, it may not be possible to build a query or report that the developer did not envision. This means traditional tools are most often used to answer easy questions. Answering hard questions with only these tools available often means doing painstaking analysis by hand. Let’s consider a few examples of this: Easy Question Hard Question Value of the Hard Answer Draw a graph of the Draw a graph of the total write Allows network team to write throughput to LUN throughput to all LUNs associated with right-size the WAN circuit 70 on VMAX 1581 over critical apps across VMAXs, XIVs, and used for replication the past day NetApp Filers in the Eastside Data Center over the past month Which processor had Rank the utilization of all processors Enable orchestration the highest average based on a combination of average, engine to provision new utilization last week? maximum, and 95th percentile load based on utilization performance, leading to higher utilization and less spend Which ports on the SAN Which ports on the SAN fabric are up Reclaim SAN ports to but haven’t passed a packet in the past 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 4 fabric are down? month? avoid new purchase What is the What is the average filesystem Accurately design a thin oversubscription ratio utilization of every host attached to this storage solution to save on this thin pool? thick array? money at refresh time Send an alert when a Trigger a provisioning stop for an array Provide safeguards to pool reaches 80% full when a combined set of pools reaches improve application 80% or disk utilization is consistently availability over 70% How many disks are Which of those disks are local and Perform migrations with attached to this host? which are on arrays? What arrays are less labor and lower risk they located on, what are their IDs, of error and what SAN ports are used? Are there other hosts using the same array? The common thread among the hard questions is that they are the things actually being asked by senior resources. This is because their answers have direct, hard-dollar impact on budgets. Often the only reason for asking the easy questions is as research in service of the hard questions. This is part of the labor-intensive analysis necessary to answer hard questions. This investment of labor also means that the number of hard questions that can be answered is inherently limited: There are always more questions than answers. The ability to get directly to the hard answers without the labor investment has the potential to change the way an IT organization operates in fundamental ways. Automating the Answers EMC’s ViPR SRM has become a very popular monitoring and reporting package for good reason. It can collect data from a diverse set of IT infrastructure products, produce thousands of useful out-of-the-box reports, and scale to meet the needs of the world’s largest data centers. Many of these out-of-the-box reports are even the sort that would qualify as ‘hard questions’ under the criteria we’ve laid out above. 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 5 This is the proposition that leads many enterprises to deploy ViPR SRM. What many organizations quickly discover is that many of their hard questions can’t be answered by those thousands of built-in reports. At this point, customization is needed. Custom reporting in any tool can be intimidating. In this article we will attempt to overcome that intimidation. Starting from the perspective of a new administrator, we build the foundational knowledge necessary to create custom reports which address specific business problems. In the process, a number of recipes are developed which can be used as-is to immediately get interesting and valuable results not included in an off-the-shelf install. About this Article This article is written as a how-to guide in which previously learned skills build on each other. It can be read by itself, but for maximum benefit it is intended as a sort of lab guide. By following along in your own ViPR SRM environment as you read, you will find yourself retaining more

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