17 Monitoring Performance; Prerequisites; Introduction To Using Performance Information - HP StorageWorks P4000 User Manual

17 Monitoring performance

The Performance Monitor provides performance statistics for iSCSI and storage system I/Os to help
you and HP support and engineering staff understand the load that the SAN is servicing.
The Performance Monitor presents real-time performance data in both tabular and graphical form as
an integrated feature in the CMC. The CMC can also log the data for short periods of time (hours or
days) to get a longer view of activity. The data will also be available via SNMP, so you can integrate
with your current environment or archive the data for capacity planning. See
SNMP" on page 130.
As a real-time performance monitor, this feature helps you understand the current load on the SAN
to provide additional data to support decisions on issues such as the following:
• Configuration options (Would network bonding help me?)
• Capacity expansion (Should I add more storage systems?)
• Data placement (Should this volume be on my SATA or SAS cluster?).
The performance data does not directly provide answers, but will let you analyze what is happening
and provide support for these types of decisions.
These performance statistics are available on a cluster, volume, and storage system basis, letting you
look at the workload on a specific volume and providing data like throughput, average I/O size,
read/write mix, and number of outstanding I/Os. Having this data helps you better understand what
performance you should expect in a given configuration. Storage system performance data will allow
you to easily isolate, for example, a specific storage system with higher latencies than the other storage
systems in the cluster.

Prerequisites

• You must have a cluster with one or more storage systems and one or more volumes connected
via iSCSI sessions.
• All storage systems in the management group must have SAN/iQ software version 8.0 or later
installed. The management group version on the Registration tab must show 8.0.
• A server must be accessing a volume to read data, write data, or both.

Introduction to using performance information

The Performance Monitor can monitor dozens of statistics related to each cluster.
The following sections offer some ideas about the statistics that are available to help you manage
your SAN effectively. These sections cover just a few examples of common questions and issues, but
they are not an exhaustive discussion of the possibilities the Performance Monitor offers.
For general concepts related to performance monitoring and analysis, see
and analysis concepts" on page 281.
"Setting up
"Performance monitoring
P4000 SAN Solution user guide 269