Tutorial: Viewing storage capacity and usage trends

You can view the capacity and usage trends of storage resources used by an application and subcomponents to diagnose how much storage a particular application is using in relation to the other applications and departments in the business hierarchy.

About this task

You want to understand how capacity is trending for storage that is used by the Book Sales DB application and the Wholesale Transaction, Retail Transactions and Online Transactions subcomponents and the association the application has with the Book Sales department and subdepartments.

Procedure

The storage resources that are used by the application and that are used by each subcomponent are associated with the application and its subcomponents. For example, the storage resources are assigned as follows:

  1. Create a database application called Book Sales DB and assign resources that use the volumes on the IBM® Storwize® V7000 with names that begin with bksales for storing sales transactions.
  2. Create the subcomponent applications named Wholesale Transaction, Retail Transactions and Online Transactions.
  3. Assign the volumes on the IBM Storwize V7000 with names that begin with bksales_ws to the Wholesale Transactions subcomponent, which is used for storing wholesale sales transactions.
  4. Assign the volumes on the IBM Storwize V7000 with names that begin with bksales_rt to the Retail Transactions subcomponent, which is used for storing retail sales transactions.
  5. Assign the volumes on the IBM Storwize V7000 with names that begin with bksales_ol to the Online Transactions subcomponent, which is used for storing online sales transactions.
    Note: On the Create Filter page, you can specify a name pattern to determine which volumes to include. For volumes, you can specify name patterns to determine from which servers, storage systems, or pools the volumes are selected. You can then click Preview to view the volumes that are selected for inclusion in your application.

Results

To monitor space usage for the Book Sales department and its subdepartments, you associate the Book Sales DB application and the Wholesale, Retail, and Online Transactions subcomponents of the application as follows:
  • You associate the Book Sales DB application with the Book Sales department.
  • You associate the Wholesale subdepartment with the Wholesale Transactions subcomponent.
  • You associate the Retail subdepartment with the Retail Transactions subcomponent.
  • You associate the Online subdepartment with the Online Transactions subcomponent.
Figure 1. The application, subcomponent, assigned resources and department association
The department to application with assigned resources association.

What to do next

You can view the capacity information that is collected about the application on the Applications page. You can also view capacity information for each application and subcomponent on the details page. When you complete adding the departments and associating the departments with the applications that are used by the departments, you can view the information that is collected about the departments on the Departments page and on the details page for the department.