What's new in IBM Storage Insights

Improved upgrade experience of IBM Storage Insights Free to Pro

IBM Storage Insights Free to Pro upgrade experience has been enhanced with a guided, transparent, and entitlement aware workflow. This improved experience helps you to seamlessly discover, understand, and upgrade to IBM Storage Insights Pro.

For more information, see Want to try or buy IBM Storage Insights Pro?.

New power metrics for Fibre Channel (FC) ports on SAN switches

You can now collect Transmit (Tx), Receive (Rx), and Temperature optical power levels from Fibre Channel (FC) ports on SAN switches for performance monitoring. The new power metrics are SFP Temperature (°C), SFP Tx Power (µW), and SFP Rx Power (µW).

For more information about the new metrics, see Table 7 in Performance metrics for switches.

Enhanced NOC dashboard and Performance widget

NOC dashboard with a card-based layout now provides real-time metrics, deviation insights, and improved navigation with filtering, sorting, and time range options. It ensures quick monitoring of system health, performance, and capacity. For more information, see Accessing the dashboard on modern UI in NOC dashboard.

The new Performance widget highlights key systems with potential issues and enables quick access to detailed analysis, improving overall visibility and troubleshooting efficiency. For more information, see Performance in Overview dashboard (Carbon).

Monitoring IBM Storage Scale System (Tech preview)

You can now monitor IBM Storage Scale System in IBM Storage Insights through Call Home with cloud services as a technology preview feature. This enhancement provides a unified navigation and viewing experience for IBM Storage Scale software and hardware systems from the modern UI.

The following enhancements are available:

• Monitor IBM Storage Scale software and hardware systems through Call Home with cloud services in the modern UI, helping you to manage file storage resources alongside your other monitored storage systems from a single location. For more information, see IBM Storage Scale System.
• Use a dedicated overview dashboard to quickly access configuration and inventory information for your IBM Storage Scale System, enabling easier visibility into your file storage environment. For more information see, Dashboard for IBM Storage Scale System section in Individual device dashboard.
• IBM Storage Scale software monitoring continues to be available in the classic user interface through a data collector.

Analyzing fleet‑level performance in modern UI

You can now analyze performance metrics across your entire fleet of storage systems in the modern UI.

The enhanced performance analysis delivers a consistent and intuitive experience for exploring performance data. With improved graph capabilities, you can quickly focus on relevant insights, adjust time ranges, and better understand trends across your environment.

The new fleet level performance graph help you reduce analysis time, identify issues faster, and make more informed decisions. For more information, see Performance views.

Enhanced capacity visualization for DS8000 storage systems

For DS8000 storage systems release 10.1 or later, you can now view enhanced capacity information with architecture-specific breakdowns and capacity savings insights. The enhanced capacity widget provides detailed visualization of capacity usage across IBM Z (Count key data) and Open Systems (Fixed block) architectures, with separate views for compression and non-compression pools.

Key capabilities include:

• View architecture-wise capacity: View IBM Z (Count key data) or Open systems (Fixed block) capacity metrics to take a glance at mainframe or distributed workloads.
• Pool type filtering: Switch between compression-enabled pools and non-compression pools to analyze capacity usage patterns and optimization opportunities
• Capacity savings visualization: View detailed breakdowns of thin provisioned savings, compression savings, and total capacity savings.

Use this enhanced capacity information to optimize storage efficiency, plan for capacity growth, and demonstrate the value of thin provisioning and compression technologies.

For more information, see Capacity view for DS8000 10.1 or later under Capacity section in Individual device dashboard and Capacity metrics for DS8000 Release 10.1 and later section in Capacity metrics for DS8000 storage systems.

REST API enhancements

Selected IBM Storage Insights public REST APIs now support a new version (version 2) format that simplifies integration with external tools and workflows across supported monitored storage systems.

Existing version of APIs (version 1) continue to be supported, allowing you to adopt new version of APIs at your own pace without disruption. Version 2 APIs are available to Free and Pro users where the corresponding version 1 APIs are available. For more information, see Rest API documentation.