IBM Storage Insights

Getting support, detecting potential and existing problems, and collecting basic information about your inventory of storage systems has never been easier. In IBM Storage Insights, you can monitor the basic health, status, and performance of storage systems. When problems occur, you can get help to identify and troubleshoot those problems and minimize potential downtime, where and when you need it. To more effectively manage network resources, you can also monitor your inventory of fabrics and switches.

Availability

IBM Storage Insights Pro subscribers: If you're currently a IBM Storage Insights Pro subscriber, the functions in IBM Storage Insights are automatically available at no additional charge, so you can immediately take advantage of new streamlined support and event monitoring capabilities. To access the functions, go to Dashboards > Operations.
Signing up for IBM Storage Insights: Do you manage IBM® block storage systems, but aren't an IBM Storage Insights Pro subscriber or currently don't have access to IBM Storage Insights? If so, and you want a unified view of a storage environment that includes diagnostic event information, an integrated support experience, and key capacity and performance metrics at no charge, consider signing up today!

To sign up, go to http://ibm.biz/InsightsReg and apply. An IBM representative will contact you soon to get you started. It's that simple, and it's free, so why wait?

Product support at your finger tips

Detecting and resolving issues in a storage environment is the focus of IBM Storage Insights. It combines storage management capabilities with a simplified yet robust IBM Support experience to help you spend less time troubleshooting storage problems and more time planning for your future storage needs.

With features such as Call Home, data collectors, a streamlined ticketing process, and proactive support, you can feel confident that your storage environment is stable, performing well, and has the capacity to meet your applications' requirements. And if a problem does occur, you can get help promptly through the unified support experience by completing the following tasks:
  • Open IBM Support tickets for a resource and automatically add a log package or select an existing log package manually to the ticket
  • Update tickets with an automatically created log package or manually select an existing log package
  • View the tickets that are open for a resource
  • View the ticket history for a resource

Additionally, IBM Support has read-only access to diagnostic information about monitored storage systems, so they can help troubleshoot and resolve problems.

Tip: You can give IBM Support permission to collect and upload log packages for the resource without contacting you every time. To set this permission, click Configuration > Settings. Then click Edit in the IBM Support Log Permissions section.

Calling home

When enabled, Call Home with email notifications transmits operational and event-related data about your storage to IBM Storage Insights through a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server connection. These events are shown in the Notifications dashboard in real time, so you can be aware of hardware failures and potentially serious configuration or environmental issues when they occur.

Data collection and monitoring

Track the availability, capacity, and performance of the storage that your organization consumes by deploying a lightweight data collector to monitor resources. You can also collect metadata about certain IBM Storage Virtualize storage systems by using Call Home with cloud service. When problems occur, you'll also be able to upload log packages to tickets to ensure IBM Support has the information it needs to help.

Your storage inventory, at a glance

The dashboard presents you with a single-pane view of the current state of the capacity, performance, and health of your storage environment.

For each storage system that is monitored, you can also view the following information:
  • The name of the storage system
  • The number of nodes and enclosures
  • The number of error and warning conditions that were detected
  • Key performance and capacity metrics

Use the table view of the dashboard to evaluate the current state of capacity across your block storage systems. You can also assess the status of the storage systems and access configuration information.

You can create customized dashboards to selectively monitor particular storage systems in your environment. Use the Notifications dashboard to quickly view and sort the latest Call Home events that were detected on your IBM block storage systems. Simply click an event to view more details about it.

Use the Switches and Fabrics operations dashboards to get a single-pane view of the health and performance of switches and fabrics.

Use the Resources menu to see inventory information about your block storage systems, fabrics, switches and hosts. Double-click a resource for more details. You can also add resources for monitoring.

Customizing your experience

With so much information that is available to you in IBM Storage Insights, being able to customize dashboards to show the key information and events that you care about are critical to helping you identify where and when problems occur.

Unlocking the full potential of IBM Storage Insights Pro

You've just read about IBM Storage Insights, the free version of IBM's cloud-based, monitoring solution for block storage devices. But what if your environment is more complex and heterogeneous, and needs advanced capabilities, such as:
  • A more comprehensive view of the performance, capacity, and health of not only your IBM block storage devices, but also your non-IBM block storage devices such as Dell EMC Unity, NetApp, and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform.
  • Support for monitoring IBM file, object, software-defined storage (SDS) systems.
  • A more comprehensive view of the performance and health of your switches and fabrics.
  • Monitoring the VMware vCenter Server components such as ESXi hosts and associated virtual machines.
  • Access to features like intelligent capacity planning, storage reclamation, storage tiering, and advanced performance metrics to help you reduce costs and optimize your data center.

IBM Storage Insights Pro might be the answer. It's the capacity-based, subscription version of the cloud-based monitoring solution and includes all the features of IBM Storage Insights, plus all the advanced features listed above!

Compare IBM Storage Insights and IBM Storage Insights Pro: To help you decide on whether upgrading to IBM Storage Insights Pro is the right decision for you, compare the offerings at IBM Storage Insights vs IBM Storage Insights Pro.
Upgrading to IBM Storage Insights Pro is a snap!: In the menu bar of IBM Storage Insights, just click Unlock the full potential of IBM Storage Insights Pro to learn more about the pro version and start your trial.