Monitoring performance of nodes

The Monitoring > Nodes page provides an easy way to monitor the performance, health status, and configuration aspects of all available nodes in the IBM Storage Scale cluster.

The Nodes page provides the following options to analyze performance of nodes:
  1. A quick view that gives the number of nodes in the system, and the overall performance of nodes based on CPU and memory usages.

    You can access this view by selecting the expand button that is placed next to the title of the page. You can close this view if not required.

    The graphs in the overview show the nodes that have the highest average performance metric over a past period. These graphs are refreshed regularly. The refresh intervals of the top three entities are depended on the displayed time frame as shown:
    • Every minute for the 5 minutes time frame
    • Every 15 minutes for the 1 hour time frame
    • Every six hours for the 24 hours time frame
    • Every two days for the 7 days' time frame
    • Every seven days for the 30 days' time frame
    • Every four months for the 365 days' time frame
  2. A nodes table that displays many different performance metrics.

    To find nodes with extreme values, you can sort the values displayed in the nodes table by different performance metrics. Click the performance metric in the table header to sort the data based on that metric.

    You can select the time range that determines the averaging of the values that are displayed in the table and the time range of the charts in the overview from the time range selector, which is placed in the upper right corner. The metrics in the table do not update automatically. The refresh button at the top of the table allows to refresh the table content with more recent data.

    You can group the nodes to be monitored based on the following criteria:
    • All nodes
    • NSD server nodes
    • Protocol nodes
  3. A detailed view of the performance and health aspects of individual nodes that are listed in the Nodes page.

    Select the node for which you need to view the performance details and select View Details. The system displays various performance charts on the right pane.

    The detailed performance view helps to drill-down to various performance aspects. The following list provides the performance details that can be obtained from each tab of the performance view:
    • Overview tab provides performance chart for the following:
      • Client IOPS
      • Client data rate
      • Server data rate
      • Server IOPS
      • Network
      • CPU
      • Load
      • Memory
    • Events tab helps to monitor the events that are reported in the node. Three filter options are available to filter the events by their status; such as Current Issues, Unread Messages, and All Events displays every event, no matter if it is fixed or marked as read. Similar to the Events page, you can also perform the operations like marking events as read and running fix procedure from this events view.
    • File Systems tab provides performance details of the file systems mounted on the node. You can view the file system read or write throughput, average read or write transactions size, and file system read or write latency.
    • NSDs tab gives status of the disks that are attached to the node. The NSD tab appears only if the node is configured as an NSD server.
    • SMB and NFS tabs provide the performance details of the SMB and NFS services hosted on the node. These tabs appear in the chart only if the node is configured as a protocol node.
    • Network tab displays the network performance details.