Triggering conditions for storage system alerts

You can set up IBM Storage Insights Pro so that it examines the attributes, capacity, and performance of a storage system and notifies you when changes or violations are detected.

Alerts can notify you of general, capacity, and performance changes and potential issues on the following resources:

Performance alert conditions for storage systems
Capacity alert conditions for storage systems
Environmental alert conditions for storage systems
General alert conditions for storage systems
Triggering conditions for storage system internal resource alerts

Important: Not all the attributes upon which you can alert are listed here. To view a complete list of attributes upon which you can alert, go to Configuration > Alert Policies. Double-click a default policy for a storage system. Click Edit Alert Definitions on the Alert Definitions tab. View the attributes that are available in the general, capacity, and performance categories. Note that the attributes that are automatically configured for alerts in the default alert policies, or default alerts, have a status of Active.

In the tables, default alerts are marked with an asterisk (*).

Tips:

The type of storage system determines which attributes and performance conditions are available for alerts. For example, triggering conditions for shares are available only for storage systems that are configured for file storage, such as Storwize V7000 Unified.
For capacity attributes, you can generate alerts when the amount of storage is greater than, less than, or equal to a specified value. You can also determine the unit of measurement for the attribute, such as KiB, MiB, GiB, or TiB.
If you are doing tasks where many volumes are being deleted, you might want to temporarily disable alerts that use the Deleted Volume attribute. For example, you might want to disable Deleted Volume alerts temporarily if you are doing maintenance tasks or decommissioning storage.

Performance alert conditions for storage systems

Define alerts that notify you when the performance of a storage system falls outside a specified threshold. In alerts, you can specify conditions based on metrics that measure the performance of volumes, disks, ports, and nodes. By creating alerts with performance conditions, you can be informed about potential bottlenecks in your storage infrastructure.

Examples:

You can define an alert to be notified when the average number of I/O operations per second for read and write operations on a storage system's volumes is greater than or equal to a specified threshold. Use this alert to be notified when the workload of a volume is high and you might need to balance that load across other volumes to improve overall performance.
You can define an alert to be notified when the percentage of the average response time that can be attributed to delays from host systems is greater than or equal to a specified threshold. Use this alert to be notified of slow hosts that might not be working efficiently.
You can also define an alert that notifies you when a metric is less than a specified threshold, such as if you want to identify volumes that might be under used.

Tips:

The type of storage system determines the metrics that can be alerted upon. For a list of the metrics that are available for each type of storage system, see Performance metrics.
Data must be collected before IBM Storage Insights Pro can determine whether a threshold is violated and an alert is generated for a performance condition.

Best practice: When you set thresholds for performance conditions, try to determine the best value so you can derive the maximum benefit without generating too many false alerts. Because suitable thresholds are highly dependent on the type of workload that is being run, hardware configuration, the number of physical disks, exact model numbers, and other factors, there are no easy or standard default rules.

A recommended approach is to monitor the performance of resources and, by using historical data, determine reasonable threshold values for each performance condition. You can then fine-tune the condition settings to minimize the number of false alerts.

Capacity alert conditions for storage systems

Capacity metadata is aggregated and collected by probes. By default, this metadata is collected once every 24 hours.

Table 1. Triggering attributes and conditions for capacity changes on storage systems
Capacity Attributes	Triggering Conditions for Attributes
Adjusted Used Capacity	The amount of capacity that can be used without exceeding the capacity limit. For example, you set a capacity limit of 80% for your storage systems. You want to get an informational alert when the adjusted used capacity exceeds 60% and a critical alert when the adjusted used capacity exceeds 80%. So, you define an informational alert with these parameters: `Adjusted Used Capacity ≥ 60%` And, you define a critical alert with these parameters: `Adjusted Used Capacity ≥ 80%`
Available Capacity (Previously known as Available Pool Space)	The total amount of the space in the pools that is not allocated to the volumes in the pools. To calculate available capacity, the following formula is used: `(pool capacity - used capacity)` For XIV systems, pool capacity is the physical capacity of the pools and does not include the provisioned capacity of the pools.
Capacity-to-Limit	The amount of capacity that is available for storing data before the capacity limit is reached. For example, if you set a capacity limit, you can define a warning alert when the available capacity relative to the capacity limit, falls below the value that you specify, such as: `Capacity-to-Limit ≤ 500 GiB`
Data Reduction	A set of techniques that can be used to reduce the amount of usable capacity that is required to store data. Examples of data reduction include data deduplication and compression. Data reduction reduces the amount of data that is stored on the system using a number of methods. The system supports data reduction pools, which contain thin-provisioned, compressed, and deduplicated volumes. The data reduction is calculated and displayed only for IBM Storage Virtualize 8.5.1 or later versions.
Data reduction Ratio (Y:1)	The ratio of capacity that is written by applications, compared to the capacity that is stored on the storage system after written data is compressed, deduplicated, or both. The data reduction ratio is calculated and displayed only for IBM Storage Virtualize 8.5.1 or later.
Deduplication Savings	The estimated percentage of capacity that is saved by using data deduplication, across all data reduction pools on the storage system. The percentage is calculated across all deduplicated volumes in the pools and does not include the capacity of volumes that are not deduplicated. Available for IBM FlashSystem A9000, IBM FlashSystem A9000R, and resources that run IBM Storage Virtualize 8.1.3 or later.
Drive Compression Ratio	The ratio of the uncompressed data size to the compressed data size for all the managed disks in a storage system. Define alerts for this attribute to monitor how well compression on drives is working and be automatically notified if compression ratios change by a percentage or reach a specific threshold. Significant drops (30%-50%) in the drive compression ratio between consecutive metadata collection times might indicate that a ransomware attack is encrypting your data. Because encrypted data does not compress well, the effectiveness of compression for that targeted data is reduced. By defining an alert that detects when the compression ratio changes, you can be notified when these drops occur and of potential attacks that might be encrypting your data. You can use the following methods to trigger drive compression ratio alerts: Use the >= or <= operators to be notified when a specific compression ratio threshold is reached. For example, if your normal baseline compression ratio is 4:1, you might want to know when it drops to 3:1 or 2:1. You can then define an alert that notifies you when the compression ratio is equal to 3:1 or less. If you want to know if your ratio improves, you can also define compression ratio thresholds of 5:1 or more, 6:1 or more, and so on. Use the Changes operator to be notified when your compression ratio changes by a percentage. For example, if you don't know your baseline compression ratio, or if it typically varies throughout the day, you might want to be notified only when it changes by a significant percentage. In that case, you can define an alert that notifies you when the compression ratio changes by 50% or more. Tip: Before a compression ratio change alert can be triggered for the first time, metadata collection must run two times. The first probe collects information about the compression ratio at the time when it runs. The next probe, which typically runs 24 hours later, collects information about the compression ratio again. If the percentage difference between the compression ratios matches or exceeds the value of the change operator, an alert is triggered.
Drive Compression Savings	The estimated amount and percentage of capacity that is saved in all of the managed disks in a storage system.
File System Capacity (Previously known as Total File System Capacity)	The total capacity on all of the file systems on the storage system or filer.
Mapped Capacity	The total volume space in the storage system that is mapped or assigned to host systems, including child pool capacity.
Overprovisioned Capacity (Previously known as Unallocatable Volume Space)	The capacity that cannot be allocated to volumes because the physical capacity of the pools cannot meet the demands for provisioned capacity. IBM Storage Insights Pro uses the following formula to determine this value: `Provisioned Capacity − Capacity` Available only for thin-provisioned volumes.
Pool Compression Ratio	The ratio of the uncompressed data size to the compressed data size for all the pools in a storage system. Define alerts for this attribute to monitor how well compression on pools is working and be automatically notified if compression ratios change by a percentage or reach a specific threshold. Significant drops (30%-50%) in the pool compression ratio between consecutive metadata collection times might indicate that a ransomware attack is encrypting your data. Because encrypted data does not compress well, the effectiveness of compression for that targeted data is reduced. By defining an alert that detects when the compression ratio changes, you can be notified when these drops occur and of potential attacks that might be encrypting your data. You can use the following methods to trigger compression ratio alerts: Use the >= or <= operators to be notified when a specific compression ratio threshold is reached. For example, if your normal baseline compression ratio is 4:1, you might want to know when it drops to 3:1 or 2:1. You can then define an alert that notifies you when the compression ratio is equal to 3:1 or less. If you want to know if your ratio improves, you can also define compression ratio thresholds of 5:1 or more, 6:1 or more, and so on. Use the Changes operator to be notified when your compression ratio changes by a percentage. For example, if you don't know your baseline compression ratio, or if it typically varies throughout the day, you might want to be notified only when it changes by a significant percentage. In that case, you can define an alert that notifies you when the compression ratio changes by 50% or more. Tip: Before a compression ratio change alert can be triggered for the first time, metadata collection must run two times. The first probe collects information about the compression ratio at the time when it runs. The next probe, which typically runs 24 hours later, collects information about the compression ratio again. If the percentage difference between the compression ratios matches or exceeds the value of the change operator, an alert is triggered.
Pool Compression Savings	The estimated amount and percentage of capacity that is saved in all of the pools in a storage system.
Raw Capacity	The total unformatted disk capacity of a storage system. When this value is calculated, IBM Storage Insights Pro does not include the capacity of storage system disks that become missing after data collection.
Reserved Capacity (Previously known as Reserved Pool Space)	The amount of unused capacity in the pool that is reserved for provisioning and optimization tasks. Pool capacity is reserved when a provisioning or optimization task is created, and used when the task is run.
Safeguarded Capacity	The capacity that is consumed by all of the Safeguarded Copies for a source volume in IBM Storage Virtualize and DS8000. This value applies only to volumes that are the source in a Safeguarded Copy relationship.
Safeguarded Used Capacity (%)	The percentage of safeguarded capacity currently used. For example, Safeguarded Used Capacity (%) is greater than or equal to 25%.
Total Compression Ratio	The ratio of the uncompressed data size to the compressed data size for the entire storage system. The value N/A is displayed if the storage system contains at least one pool that uses compressing Flash Core Module (FCM) drives and also contains at least one compressed volume in any type of pool. Define alerts for this attribute to monitor how well compression on a storage system is working and be automatically notified if compression ratios change by a percentage or reach a specific threshold. Significant drops (30%-50%) in the compression ratio between consecutive metadata collection times might indicate that a ransomware attack is encrypting your data. Because encrypted data does not compress well, the effectiveness of compression for that targeted data is reduced. By defining an alert that detects when the compression ratio changes, you can be notified when these drops occur and of potential attacks that might be encrypting your data. You can use the following methods to trigger compression ratio alerts: Use the >= or <= operators to be notified when a specific compression ratio threshold is reached. For example, if your normal baseline compression ratio is 4:1, you might want to know when it drops to 3:1 or 2:1. You can then define an alert that notifies you when the compression ratio is equal to 3:1 or less. If you want to know if your ratio improves, you can also define compression ratio thresholds of 5:1 or more, 6:1 or more, and so on. Use the Changes operator to be notified when your compression ratio changes by a percentage. For example, if you don't know your baseline compression ratio, or if it typically varies throughout the day, you might want to be notified only when it changes by a significant percentage. In that case, you can define an alert that notifies you when the compression ratio changes by 50% or more. Tip: Before a compression ratio change alert can be triggered for the first time, metadata collection must run two times. The first probe collects information about the compression ratio at the time when it runs. The next probe, which typically runs 24 hours later, collects information about the compression ratio again. If the percentage difference between the compression ratios matches or exceeds the value of the change operator, an alert is triggered.
Total Compression Savings	The estimated amount and percentage of capacity that is saved in a storage system by using data compression techniques.
Shortfall	The difference between the amount of provisioned capacity that is committed to the volumes in the pools and the actual physical capacity that is available in the pools. As the provisioned capacity is allocated to the thin-provisioned and compressed volumes, the shortfall increases and becomes more critical. This value is determined by the formula, `Overprovisioned Capacity ÷ Committed but Unused Capacity` For example, the physical capacity of the pools is 70 GiB, but 150 GiB of provisioned capacity was committed to the thin-provisioned volumes. If the volumes are using 50 GiB, then there is still 100 GiB committed to those volumes (150 GiB − 50 GiB) with only 20 GiB of available pool capacity (70 GiB − 50 GiB). Because only 20 GiB of the pool capacity is available, 80 GiB of the committed space cannot be allocated (100 GiB - 20 GiB).
Snapshot Space	The amount of space that is used by all of the snapshots of the file systems that are associated with the IBM Spectrum® Scale cluster.
Total Provisioned (%) (Previously know as Provisioned Capacity (%))	The percentage of the physical capacity that is committed to the total provisioned capacity of the volumes in the pool. If the value exceeds 100%, the amount of available physical capacity is less than the amount that is committed to the volume. In this case, you can reduce the amount of physical capacity that is committed to the provisioned capacity, or increase the amount of available physical capacity.
Total Provisioned (GiB) (Previously know as Provisioned Capacity)	The total storage capacity on all the volumes in pools. For thin-provisioned and compressed volumes, this value includes provisioned capacity. For volumes with parent pools, this value includes child pool capacity.
Total Savings (Previously know as Total Capacity Savings)	The estimated percentage of capacity that is saved by using data deduplication, data compression, and thin provisioning. Available for IBM FlashSystem A9000 and IBM FlashSystem A9000R, IBM Storage Accelerate, XIV storage systems with firmware version 11.6 or later, and resources that run IBM Storage Virtualize.
Total Savings Ratio (Y:1)	The ratio of all the capacity savings after data reduction and thin-provisioning compared to the capacity that is stored on the storage system after data is compressed, deduplicated, or both. The total savings ratio is calculated and displayed only for IBM Storage Virtualize 8.5.1 or later.
Unmapped Capacity (Previously known as Unassigned Volume Space)	The total volume space in the storage system that is not mapped or assigned to host systems.
Unused Volume Capacity (Previously known as Effective Unallocated Volume Space)	The amount of the provisioned capacity in the storage pool that is not used.
Usable Capacity (GiB) (Previously known as Capacity)	The amount of capacity that is available for storing data on a system, pool, array, or managed disk after formatting and RAID techniques are applied.
Used Capacity (Previously known as Physical Allocation)	The percentage of physical space in pools that is allocated to volumes, including child pools. The value is always less than or equal to 100% because you cannot allocate more physical space to the volumes than is available in the pools. This value is determined by the formula, `Used Capacity ÷ Capacity × 100`. For example, if the capacity that is reserved for volumes is 50 GiB for a volume size of 200 GiB, used capacity is 25%.
Used Capacity (Previously known as Used Pool Space)	The capacity in the pool that is allocated to and used by volumes.
Unreserved Capacity (Previously known as Unreserved Pool Space)	The amount of space in storage system pools that is not allocated for volumes, and is not reserved by pending or scheduled provisioning tasks.

Environmental alert conditions for storage systems

The following table outlines the alert conditions that are available only for IBM Storage Virtualize 8.6.2.0 or later and DS8000 storage systems with firmware version 7.7.2.0 or later:

Table 2. Triggering attributes and conditions for environmental changes on IBM Storage Virtualize and DS8000 storage systems
Environmental attributes	Triggering conditions for attributes
System Temperature (°C)	The average temperature of the storage system in degree Celsius (°C). The value is average temperature that the storage system is maintaining in the last 24 hours.
System Temperature (°F)	The average temperature of the storage system in Fahrenheit. The value is average temperature that the storage system is maintaining in the last 24 hours.
Total Power Consumed (Watts)	The average total power that all the components of storage systems including nodes are consuming. The value is in Watts.
Power Efficiency (Watts/TB)	Total power consumed divided by Raw capacity in bytes. The value denotes how efficiently the storage system is consuming the power.
Carbon Emission (kgCO₂e/h)	The carbon emissions per hour by the storage system. Note: Carbon Emission (kgCO₂e/h) alert condition is available only for the IBM Storage Virtualize systems with version 8.6.2.0 or later, connected through Call Home with cloud services and DS8000 storage systems with firmware version 7.7.2.0 or later.

General alert conditions for storage systems

Table 3. Triggering attributes and conditions for general changes on storage systems
General Attributes	Triggering Conditions for Attributes
Firmware	The firmware version of the microcode on a storage system. For the DS-series of storage systems, this value represents the Code Bundle version and the SEA or LMC Version of the firmware. To view information about the code bundles for the firmware versions of the DS-series, go to IBM® Support and search for code bundle information. An internet connection is required to access the support site.
Status	One of the following statuses is detected for a storage system: Not Normal An error or warning status was detected for a storage system. Warning A warning status was detected for a storage system. This status might occur if a storage system comes online or if its version changes. Error An error status was detected for a storage system. This status might occur if the cooling fans in a storage system are stopped and the internal temperature is too high or if a storage system goes offline.
Warranty or Maintenance expires within the next	Warranty or maintenance expires within the next 30 to 365 days. Valid value range is 30 to 365 and the default value is 90 days.