Monitoring capacity usage at different levels of a business hierarchy

The monitoring and management of applications and departments enables you to monitor storage capacity usage, recognize trends, monitor health status, and troubleshoot performance of the storage resources in your business organization.

The department model comprises these main elements:

The department
The subdepartments that the department contains
The applications, or the application subcomponents, or both that the department uses

In the following tutorial, you want to create a department model that monitors the capacity and space usage of the Books Sales department, and these subdepartments:

Wholesale
Retail
Online

To monitor the capacity and space usage of the departments, you add the applications that the department and its subdepartment use to each of the subdepartments.

The department model that you create determines how you can view capacity usage and space information. To view the total capacity and space usage of a department regardless of the subdepartments that the department contains, you create a department and add the applications and subcomponents to the department.

If, however, you want to see the capacity and space usage of the department and its subdepartments, you create a department hierarchy by adding subdepartments to departments. You then add the applications and application subcomponents that each subdepartment uses to the subdepartments. You can then view capacity and space usage for the department and for the individual subdepartments.

You can create more complex models of departments by adding subdepartments to subdepartments. In the following illustration, the department model is extended to include two more layers of subdepartments under the Wholesale subdepartment.

To monitor the capacity and space usage of the departments in your business organization, complete the following tasks:

Create the Book Sales department.
Create the Wholesale, Retail, and Online departments to represent the subdepartments.
Add the Wholesale, Retail, and Online as subdepartments to the Book Sales department.
Create the Book Sales DB application and the Wholesale Transactions, Retail Transactions and Online Transactions applications to represent the subcomponents that are used by the departments.

Different applications require different storage capabilities, and different levels of performance and uptime. The storage requirements of the departments are constantly growing and they need to modify their behaviors in a way that justifies the cost of their actions concerning storage utilization. The data modeling of storage resources using the application and department concept enables you to plan and implement a chargeback system if necessary.