Begin data collection
Deploy data collectors and enable Call Home to get the information that you need to effectively monitor your storage environment.
To collect status, configuration, capacity, performance, and diagnostic metadata data about your
storage environment, you can use the following methods:
- Call Home with cloud services
- Enable Call Home with cloud services to collect metadata about storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize 8.5.3 and later and have at least 128 GB of memory per node. A data collector is not required to monitor a storage system when you use Call Home with cloud services.
- Data collectors
- Deploy lightweight data collectors in your data center to collect metadata about storage systems, switches, fabrics, and VMware ESXi hosts. The server or virtual machine where you deploy a data collector must have access to the resources that you want to monitor.
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Metadata flows in one direction: from your data center to IBM® Cloud over HTTPS. In the IBM Cloud, your metadata is protected by physical, organizational, access, and security controls.
IBM Storage Insights is ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management certified.
GDPR: IBM Storage
Insights can assist customers in meeting the requirements of the EU General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR).
When metadata is collected
IBM Storage
Insights collects metadata about the status, configuration, capacity, and performance of your
monitored devices. Diagnostic data is also collected into log packages and added to support tickets.
The following types of tasks are used to collect that information:
- Probes
- Probes collect status, configuration, and capacity metadata once every 24 hours.
- For DS8000 storage systems and their pools, the value for used capacity is collected once every hour. To customize that interval, contact IBM Support.
- For some devices, additional probes are automatically run when specific events occur on those devices, or when many events are detected in a short time period. To avoid performance bottlenecks in those cases, probes are not run more than once every 20 minutes.
- Performance Monitors
- Performance Monitors collect performance metadata every 5 minutes.
- For Dell EMC storage systems that manage block storage, performance metadata is automatically collected every fifteen minutes.
- For IBM Spectrum® Scale storage systems that are enabled to collect performance metadata for file storage, the collection schedule can be configured when or after the storage system is added for monitoring. The intervals that can be selected for collecting performance metadata are every 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 or 60 minutes.
Metadata collection tips:
- After probes and performance monitors run, the GUI is updated automatically to display the latest metadata for your monitored devices.
- Only metadata about your monitored devices is collected. The actual data that is stored on devices is never accessed or collected.