Change history for IBM Storage Insights

Changes in Q1 2024 (March 6)

For information about the latest features and enhancements in IBM Storage Insights, see What's new in IBM Storage Insights.

Changes in Q4 2023 (December 7)

The following features and enhancements were made available in the Q4 2023 update of IBM Storage Insights:

Seamless monitoring DS8000® R9.4

You can add DS8000 devices that are running on R9.4 version to your IBM Storage Insights and monitor them seamlessly.

Sustainability monitoring for IBM Storage Flash

Sustainability in business refers to a company's strategy to reduce the negative environmental impact that results from their operations in a particular market. An organization's sustainability practices are typically analyzed against environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics. For data center infrastructure, sustainability is measured by the carbon emissions that are generated through direct power consumption and the power that is needed for system cooling, expressed as CO2e (which is carbon dioxide equivalent).

Current market standards mandate sustainability reports for data centers to furnish comprehensive insights into each infrastructure type. In its recent release, IBM Storage Insights facilitates the monitoring of energy consumption metrics for IBM Storage Flash. It includes power, temperature (in both Celsius and Fahrenheit), and power efficiency measured in Watts or Raw TB. The platform enables storage administrators to configure sustainability Service Level Agreements (SLA). As the alerts are based on these metrics, contribution to the efficient management of energy consumption and the reduction of environment impacts the data center operations.

Learn more about the new updates in:

• Block storage systems
• Performance metrics
• Defining alert definitions for environmental and custom alerts for Sustainability

Note: Sustainability data collection is supported for Call Home with cloud services connected devices. It is NOT supported for Data Collector (DC) connected devices.

If any ransomware alert gets detected, it will affect the health status of the storage system in the Carbon dashboard and not in the Classic IBM Storage Insights view.

Unlocking the advanced diagnostic power of DS8000

IBM Storage Insights enhanced the diagnostic capabilities for DS8000 by enabling the seamless offloading of various diagnostic data types. These data types include PE packages, On-Demand Data (ODD) dumps, and State Saves. Previously, only General PE packages might be offloaded from IBM Storage Insights. For other types of diagnostic data like On-Demand Data (ODD) dumps and State Saves, you needed to offload it directly from the DS8000.

With this update, you can access diverse diagnostic data types and streamline the troubleshooting processes for DS8000. Learn more about DS8000.

REST API

IBM Storage Insights REST APIs provide a seamless integration pathway for external applications, including integrated operation managers, with IBM Storage Insights. Following REST principles, these APIs employ predictable resource oriented URLs, accept form-encoded request bodies, generate JSON-encoded responses, and comply with standard HTTP response codes, authentication methods, and verbs. Also, they incorporate safeguards against bursts of incoming requests for enhanced stability. IBM Storage Insights administrators and monitor personas can effectively use the REST API to access relevant data within their designated tenant. Following is the list of APIs developed in this release:

• For a IBM Storage Insights administrator/monitor user, list all available block, file, and object storage systems added to a tenant.
• For a IBM Storage Insights administrator/monitor user, get details of a particular storage system added to a tenant.
• For a IBM Storage Insights administrator/monitor user, get all alerts generated on a IBM Storage Insights tenant.
• For a IBM Storage Insights administrator/monitor user, get alerts of a particular storage system added to a tenant.
• For a IBM Storage Insights administrator/monitor user, get all notifications generated on a IBM Storage Insights tenant.
• For a IBM Storage Insights administrator/monitor user, get notifications of a particular storage system added to a tenant.
• For a IBM Storage Insights administrator/monitor user, get all volume details of a particular storage system added to a tenant.

The Admins need API keys to perform certain operations. For example, To collect data from multiple management services to a single dashboard and showcase the view of data centers. The Admin can perform the following:

• Generate the REST API key: The process to generate the API key remains the same if it is generated for the first time or if there is a list of already generated API keys.
• Revoke the REST API key: It enables the Admin to remove access of an API key from the user who already has access to it.
• Rotate/Renew REST API key: It enables the Admin to provide a new REST API key to the user if it gets lost and Renew in case the duration of the key is expired.

Learn more about REST API.

Metric API

With the new Metric API, you can get all the performance and capacity metric details of a particular storage system added to a tenant for an IBM Storage Insights administrator/monitor user.

Learn more about Metric API details in Swagger documentation.

Overview dashboard (Carbon)

Experience a new look and feel of IBM Storage Insights. With the new User Interface (UI), you can switch between the new experience (modern carbon view) and classic IBM Storage Insights view.

You can now experience the new overview dashboard that provides aggregated and system level information about different aspects, such as, resources, capacity, sustainability, workload protection, system protection. Learn more about Overview dashboard (Carbon).

New VOLSER column for DS8000 Copy Data section

For DS8000, you can now view the VOLSER column for your count-key-data (CKD) volumes in two more tabs of the Copy Data section. The following changes were made in the Copy Data section of the DS8000 details page:

• A new VOLSER column that shows the volume serial number for DS8000 CKD data is added in the Remote Relationships and FlashCopy tabs.
• By default the VOLSER column is shown in both Remote Relationships and the FlashCopy tabs in the Copy Data section of DS8000 details page.

Policy based replication-high availability support for IBM FlashSystem®

Policy-based Replication for HA is now supported for IBM Storage FlashSystem, which are added to IBM Storage Insights through Call Home with cloud services. You can now view the synchronous replication policies as 2-site-ha that are associated with the volume groups. The IBM Storage Insights GUI is enhanced to display the views that are relevant for both synchronous and asynchronous policies that are assigned to the volume groups.

The following changes were made in the Volume Groups section of the Flash system details page:

• The following listed columns were renamed:
  • Topology to Replication Topology
  • RPO Alert to RPO
  • Current RPO to Current Recovery Point
  • RPO Status to Policy Status
• A new column Partition Name is added which is not a default column.
• A tooltip is added to the Location 1 System and Location 2 System columns that show if it is a production copy or recovery copy.

Also, similar changes were made in the Replication Policies tab of the Copy Data section in the device details page.

The following listed columns were renamed:

• Topology to Replication Topology

• RPO Alert to RPO

• Location 1 to Location 1 System

• Location 2 to Location 2 System

Enhanced default alert policies and capacity alerting

Alerting in IBM Storage Insights got better as all the default alert policies for block and file storage systems are now configured with the advanced capacity prediction. The alerting function uses the power of AI-enabled capacity planning of IBM Storage Insights to trigger you the relevant capacity alert when it is most crucial for your storage environment.

All default alert policies now come with the following default capacity alert definitions along with existing default alert conditions.

• Storage system used capacity is greater than or equal to 60% in the next 180 days
• Storage system used capacity is greater than or equal to 75% in the next 90 days
• Storage system used capacity is greater than or equal to 80% in the next 30 days

You can also create a custom alert on capacity limit condition based on your requirement. For example, you can create an alert for your storage systems when their used capacity reaches the capacity limit.

Two new fields Capacity and Span were added while setting up alert definitions for Used Capacity.

• The Capacity field is provided with 2 drop down values. Custom for providing the required value in the Value field, and Capacity Limit to default set Value to 80%.
• The Span field is provided to specify the required duration by days or dates. None value is also provided for Span field.

Learn more about defining alert definitions for capacity changes.

Changes in Q3 2023 (September 4)

Changes in Q2 2023 (June 5)

Changes in Q1 2023 (March 13)

Changes in Q4 2022 (December 16)

Changes in Q3 2022 (August 19)

Changes in Q2 2022 (May 31)

Changes in Q1 2022 (March 7)

Changes in Q4 2021 (December 2)

Changes in Q3 2021 (August 23)

Changes in Q2 2021 (June 21)

Changes in Q1 2021 (March 22)

Changes in Q4 2020 (November 14)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for Q4 2020:

Monitoring snapshot information for volumes that are protected by Safeguarded Copy

With Safeguarded Copy in DS8000 8.5.0 and later, you can improve cyber resiliency by frequently creating protected, point-in-time backups of critical data, with minimum impact and effective resource utilization.

You can now view snapshot information for volumes that are backed up using the Safeguarded Copy feature across all your monitored DS8000 storage systems. Use this information to monitor the volume capacity that is protected and the capacity that is used to store volume backups for Safeguarded Copy.

Viewing topology and location information for DS8000 Fibre Channel (FC) ports

You use IBM Storage Insights to monitor DS8000 storage systems, and you need to understand the port topology and the location of the ports in the hardware hierarchy? Not a problem. From the Resources menu, click Block Storage Systems, double-click a DS8000 storage system, and click FC Ports.

You can now check whether an FC port uses the FICON® or the SCSI FCP protocol and view the frame, I/O enclosure, and host adapter for the port.

Changes in Q3 2020 (August 22)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for Q3 2020:

Using the Monitor role for monitoring IBM Storage Virtualize

Now, users with a Monitor role can collect performance metadata from IBM Storage Virtualize 8.3.1.2 or later. So, when you add a storage system, just add the credentials of a user with the Monitor role and you'll get the key performance metadata that you need to monitor your storage environment.

Monitoring performance for Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F and G Series

You can now monitor the performance of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F and G Series storage systems. You can also define performance alerts so that you're notified of bandwidth, latency, and other issues before they impact your storage environment. And, you can compare your storage workloads and response times across your entire storage environment.

Viewing the name and VOLSER properties for DS8000 CKD volumes

For DS8000, you can now view both the volume name and the volume serial number (VOLSER) for your count-key-data (CKD) volumes.

Determining the capacity to be licensed

The Managed Capacity page (Configuration > Managed Capacity) was updated to make it easier for you to understand how much capacity that you need to license for IBM Storage Insights Pro. The updates include:

• The names of column headings were changed and the hover help was revised to help you complete your compliance check.
• The capacity to be licensed and other capacity columns are now shown in tebibytes (TiB) to make it easier to compare the values with the value shown at the top of the page.

Changes in Q2 2020 (May 30)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for Q2 2020:

Setting capacity limits

Set capacity limits for storage systems and pools. You want to know how much capacity you have left before your storage systems or pools are 80% full? Just set a capacity limit and you'll know how close you are to reaching your capacity limit. Then, check the Capacity-to-Limit (GiB) value and see how much capacity you can use before you reach your limit.

Support for Pure Storage devices

You can now monitor FlashArray//M and FlashArray//X devices. View information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of this non-IBM storage. Other features, such as alerting, health monitoring, advanced analytics, and reporting are also supported.

Monitoring DS8000 capacity on flash drives

Monitor the volume capacity that Easy Tier®® places on Tier 1 and Tier 2 flash, high-capacity drives on DS8000 storage systems. View the capacity and available capacity of Tier 1 and Tier 2 flash drives in a pool and the distribution of volume extents across each of the Easy Tier drive classes.

Assigning data collectors to devices

You can now assign which data collectors collect metadata from your storage devices. For example, you can configure your data collection services as follows:

• Assign data collectors to devices based on the locations of the data centers.
• Assign data collectors to devices by production, development, or test platform to comply with your company's data governance rules.
• Assign multiple data collectors to devices so that if one data collector fails another data collector takes over.
• Assign data collectors to groups of devices to optimize and balance data collection services.

Renaming data collectors

You can now change the name of the data collector that is displayed in the GUI so that it's easier to identify. From the Configuration menu, click Data Collectors. Right-click the data collector that you want to rename, and click Rename. Change the data collector name in Rename Data Collector.

Additional OS support for data collectors

The IBM Storage Insights data collector now supports RHEL 7.x on Little Endian POWER8® (PPC64LE). The data collector on Linux® PPC64LE has the limitation that you cannot monitor non-IBM devices and FlashSystem A9000, XIV®, and IBM Spectrum®IBM Storage Virtualize Accelerate devices.

Changes in Q1 2020 (March 7)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 1Q 2020:

Creating reports

In the free version of IBM Storage Insights, you can now create, schedule, and send:

• Capacity reports for storage systems and pools
• Inventory reports for storage systems

Share information with your colleagues to help them plan capacity purchases and keep them up-to-date with the configuration and properties of their storage systems. If you like what you see in these reports and want more, just upgrade to IBM Storage Insights Pro.

Hot tip: In both IBM Storage Insights and IBM Storage Insights Pro, you can now send reports as PDF files. Just click the PDF option when scheduling the delivery of your report.

Enhancements to capacity reporting and terminology

• Gain even more insights into capacity usage and capacity growth. On the Overview charts, you can now easily gauge how much capacity you have, how much capacity you've used, and how much capacity is still available. Use the new metrics, Recent Fill Rate (%) and Recent Growth (GiB), to see which storage systems and pools are experiencing the most growth or are running out of capacity the quickest.
• To enhance your experience of our products and to provide a unified and simplified view of capacity concepts, IBM Storage is aligning the capacity terms across all IBM Storage products. To ensure that we use the same capacity term for the same capacity concept across our products, IBM Storage Insights has changed 47 of the capacity terms that it uses, removed 4 terms that are no longer needed, and added 1 new term.

  Learn more about the capacity terminology changes.

Monitoring more IBM FlashSystem devices

The new FlashSystem family is supported. View information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of IBM Storage FlashSystem 5000, IBM Storage FlashSystem 5100, IBM Storage FlashSystem 7200, and IBM Storage FlashSystem 9200 storage systems.

Enhanced support for IBM Storage Virtualize in IBM Storage Insights Pro

• Monitor the cache fullness of pools and the aggregated cache fullness of nodes to identify which ones are experiencing heavy cache usage.
• Monitor and alert on unmap operations at the host connection level. Determine how much unmap workload each host is contributing by measuring the performance of unmap volume commands.
• Monitor Storage Class Memory (SCM). You can now monitor the volume capacity that Easy Tier places on SCM drives on IBM Storage Virtualize systems, such as IBM Storage FlashSystem 9100, IBM Storage FlashSystem 7200, and the IBM Storwize® family.
• Create and schedule predefined reports about the IP ports on the nodes in IBM Storage Virtualize systems, such as SAN Volume Controller, IBM Storage FlashSystem 9100, IBM Storage FlashSystem V9000, and the IBM Storwize family.

Adding IP ports to general groups

You can now add IP ports to general groups so that you can receive alert notifications about changes in the configuration or attributes of the IP ports in a general group.

Monitoring disk utilization for RAID arrays on DS8000 storage systems

For RAID arrays on DS8000 8.5.0 or later, the disk utilization values were updated in performance charts and reports. You can now more accurately check how busy the disks in the array are over a period and identify arrays that are underutilized and overutilized.

Preventing gaps in your performance data during service outages

To help prevent gaps in your performance data during service outages, data collectors continue to collect performance metadata when your instance of IBM Storage Insights is offline during service outages.

Removing data collectors

You can now remove the data collectors that you are no longer using from IBM Storage Insights.

Support for dynamic changes to IP addresses

IBM Storage Insights can now use the host name of storage systems to collect data. Before this update, if you added a storage system by using a host name, IBM Storage Insights still used the IP address to collect data.

Changes in Q4 2019 (November 16)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 4Q 2019:

Important capacity updates

Capacity values in reports, views, and charts were updated to better reflect capacity usage in devices that support hardware compression. The devices affected by this update are:

• Storage systems such as IBM Storage FlashSystem 9100, IBM Storage FlashSystem 900, and Storwize V7000 Gen3, which contain IBM FlashCore® Modules with hardware compression
• SAN Volume Controller and Storwize storage systems that are configured as storage virtualizers, and which use back-end storage systems with hardware compression

In historical capacity charts for storage systems and pools, you'll see a sharp drop in capacity and used space. That's because capacity values are now measured based on the physical capacity rather than the effective capacity. Before, for example, the capacity value measured for your device was 250 TiB. Now it's 100 TiB. That's because the capacity savings achieved by hardware compression are no longer included when capacity is measured.

Don't worry, you can still monitor the capacity values that show the capacity savings that are achieved with hardware compression! To capture this information, new columns were added to the Block Storage Systems and Pools pages. Just check the column names that begin with Effective, such as Effective Capacity (GiB) and Effective Used Capacity (%).

Monitoring non-IBM storage

You can now add Dell EMC Unity and NetApp storage systems running ONTAP 9 to the list of non-IBM storage systems that you can monitor and report on in IBM Storage Insights Pro.

Monitoring IBM Storage Virtualize IP ports

You can now view detailed information about the IP ports on the nodes on IBM Storage Virtualize systems, such as SAN Volume Controller, IBM Storage FlashSystem 9100, IBM Storage FlashSystem V9000, and the IBM Storwize family.

Use this information to monitor the health and status of the IP ports, and to determine whether the ports are used for hosts, storage, or remote copy. Alerting is also supported for IP ports.

Monitoring IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud storage systems

You can now monitor IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud storage systems. You can view information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of the storage systems. Other features, such as alerting, health monitoring, advanced analytics, and reporting are also supported.

Monitoring whether reclamation is causing a performance issue on IBM Storage Virtualize

You can now review node metrics that measure the operations that are used to free up and reclaim capacity in data reduction pools such as:

• The number of volume extents that were reclaimed
• The amount of capacity that can be reclaimed
• The rate at which capacity is recovered for reuse

You can use these metrics to help determine if reclamation is affecting performance. Track these metrics over time in the performance charts to measure the amount of capacity can be reclaimed and the rate at which it can be recovered by the garbage collection process.

Monitoring the cache fullness of nodes on IBM Storage Virtualize

You can now quickly see how full your cache is by adding new cache fullness metrics to the performance charts when you view the performance of nodes for your storage systems. Add and track cache fullness metrics to identify the nodes that are experiencing heavy cache usage. This heavy usage might cause latency issues such as write operations being queued and slow response times for the volumes that are managed by the node.

Use the cache fullness information to help investigate problems for volumes in a pool and to determine whether to move a volume to a different I/O group where the pool's cache partition does not have a cache fullness problem. You can select the following cache metrics for node performance:

• Peak Read Cache Fullness (%)
• Peak Write Cache Fullness (%)
• Read Cache Fullness (%)
• Write Cache Fullness (%)

Selecting metrics made easier

Want to add or track new or other metrics? A single click and you clear the metrics you don’t want in the chart. To build the chart, scroll and select the metrics you want from the list of categories, and as you build, you’ll see which metrics you’ve selected in the pane on the right. Save your changes and get the chart that you need to track your metrics. For example, you can now quickly select the metrics you need in performance charts so you can rapidly investigate performance issues.

With the new metrics selection dialog, you can:

• Determine the available categories of performance metric at a glance, for example, volume, disk, port, and node
• Scan all of the metrics within a category
• Quickly navigate to and view the desired metric
• Clear selected metrics
• See the number of selected metrics for each category

Changes in Q3 2019 (September 29)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 3Q 2019:

What's happening in my environment?

Want to quickly understand what's happening in your environment so that you can easily identify which storage systems need your attention? Are you focused on triaging the health of your storage to minimize downtime and maximize performance? With the new Operations dashboard, grab your morning cup of coffee and quickly assess which block storage systems in your inventory need attention. Storage systems are listed in order of their health status to help you rapidly diagnose and address the types of issues that are happening. Simply drill down into the components where an error is identified to view the details of the issue.

Now, the health status of storage systems in IBM Storage Insights is based on the status that the storage system reports for itself and all of its components. In previous versions, the health status was based on Call Home events. The health status in IBM Storage Insights is closer now to what is shown in the storage system's GUI and CLI.

Monitoring IBM Storage Virtualize IP ports

You can now view detailed information about the IP ports on the nodes on block storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize, such as IBM Storage FlashSystem family, SAN Volume Controller, and the IBM Storwize family.

Monitoring unmap operations on IBM Storage Virtualize

You can now measure the performance of unmap volume commands and define alerts so that you are notified when unmap operations values fall outside thresholds you specify. Metrics, such as the average number of MiBs that are unmapped from volumes, I/O rates, data rates, and response times for unmap operations, are collected and shown at the pool, node, and I/O group levels.

Sending alert notifications only after sustained threshold violations

Now you can use enhanced notification frequency settings to specify that alerts are only triggered after a problem has occurred for a sustained period of time. You can further fine-tune your notification frequency by combining this setting with other notification frequency settings. Other frequency settings include send once until the problem clears, send every time the problem occurs, or send at regular time intervals.

Automatic upgrade of your data collectors

Now you can benefit from the automatic upgrade of your data collectors as soon as new versions are available. Automatic upgrades ensure that you're running the most up-to-date version of the data collector with all the latest fixes.

New versions of OS data collector support

IBM Storage Insights now supports Windows Server 2019 and CentOS releases 6 and 7.

Changes in Q2 2019 (June 2)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 2Q 2019:

Viewing notifications for your storage

See what needs attention in your storage environment in one place: the Notifications dashboard. Click Dashboards > Notifications to view call home events sent by your devices, upgrade recommendations, and best practice notifications.

Viewing recommendations for your storage

IBM Storage Insights analyzes your device data to identify violations of best practice guidelines and other risks, and to provide recommendations about how to address these potential problems. Click Insights > Advisor to view these recommendations.

Specifying which users are emailed about service outages

Control which users are notified about service outages for your instance of IBM Storage Insights. By default, all emails about outages are sent to the owner of the instance. Now you can decide who is notified when service outages occur.

Monitoring IBM Storwize V5000E storage systems

Monitor Storwize V5000E storage systems. You can view information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of the storage systems. Other features, such as alerting, health monitoring, advanced analytics, and reporting are also supported.

Viewing application workload

View the total workload of an application that is consuming storage. Previously, to investigate the workload of an application, you had to review the workloads of the individual volumes. Now you can select an application on the Applications page and click View Performance to view its Total I/O Rate and Total Data Rate.

Faster ways to view and acknowledge your alerts

Now it's easier and faster to view and acknowledge your alerts. On the Alerts dashboard, just double-click an alert to see the details of the alert on the same page, including a performance chart for performance alerts. You can view summary details of several alerts at the same time, and acknowledge them all with a single click.

Viewing more IBM Storage FlashSystem and XIV notifications

See more notifications from IBM Storage FlashSystem 900, IBM FlashSystem A9000, and XIV storage systems. You can also see recommendations for IBM FlashSystem A9000 and XIV storage systems.

IBM Storage Insights for IBM Spectrum Control

IBM Storage Insights for IBM Spectrum Control is an IBM Cloud® service that can help you predict and prevent storage problems before they impact your business. It is complementary to IBM Spectrum Control and is available at no additional cost if you have an active license with a current subscription and support agreement for IBM Virtual Storage Center, IBM Spectrum Storage Suite, or any edition of IBM Spectrum Control.

Changes in Q1 2019 (March 3)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 1Q 2019:

Configuring alerts using alert policies

Use alert policies to configure alerts for groups of resources rather than just for individual resources. Simply create an alert policy and specify the alerts that you want, and those alerts are automatically applied to all the resources that you include in the policy. Modifying alerts for resources is also a snap because the changes that you make are automatically applied to all the resources in the policy at the same time.

Reporting

• Selecting the resources you're interested is made easier. Now, you can easily generate predefined capacity reports about the resources that you are interested in. It just takes a click to select managed disks by storage systems, pools by storage systems, servers by applications, volumes by servers.
• Send custom and predefined reports as CSV and HTML attachments. Your colleagues want to add information or modify the report? Just attach the report as a CSV file so that they can download and open the report in a spreadsheet!
• Send scheduled reports now. Your colleagues can't wait for the next run of a monthly report? Just click and run the report now to share the information with your colleagues!

Monitoring compression savings for RAID arrays in IBM FlashSystem 900, model AE3 storage system

For IBM Storage FlashSystem 900, model AE3 with firmware 1.6, view the amount of capacity that is saved when the flash modules in the RAID array use inline data compression.

Identifying mirrored volume relationships on storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize

Some volume properties were renamed to make it easier to identify the primary and secondary copies in mirrored volume relationships. For example, on the Volumes page:

• Target is now named Mirror Role and shows the value "Primary" or "Secondary".
• Mirror is now named Copy ID.

Changes in Q4 2018 (November 18)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 4Q 2018:

Reporting

• From a single page, create predefined capacity reports that you can schedule and send by email. Just pick the type of report that you want to create, such as a capacity report for storage systems, pools, or servers.
• Create predefined inventory reports for your storage systems and for the storage resources that they use, such as nodes.
• Add filters to custom reports.

Stopping and restarting data collections

Stop data collection during maintenance work on storage systems to minimize the number of informational, warning, and error alerts that are generated. You can restart data collection when the maintenance work is complete. Restarting the data collection might also help if data is not being collected for a storage system.

Defining alerts for attributes and capacity of resources

Monitor capacity and configuration to keep a close watch on critical resources and resolve issues before they affect your storage environment. You can now create attribute and capacity alerts for your storage systems to monitor changes in your environment.

Monitoring the condition and status of resources

Monitor the health of your storage environment in IBM Storage Insights Pro by checking the operational condition of your storage systems and the status of their internal resources. Before now, the state of a resource was represented based on the call home events that were received. Fresh information is now received from resources about the internal status, such as when a volume or pool goes offline.

Monitoring the state of your storage environment

Capacity and configuration data is now immediately received from resources when changes occur, such as when volumes are created or pools deleted. For example, as soon as changes occur in your environment, you can now see the live information such as capacity information on the dashboard and configuration information on the storage systems details page and properties pages. Previously this information was updated once per day.

Monitoring IBM Storwize V7000 Gen3 storage systems

Monitor Storwize V7000 Gen3 storage systems. You can view information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of the storage systems. You can also view the savings that are achieved when data is reduced, compressed, and deduplicated.

Changes in Q3 2018 (September 9)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 3Q 2018:

Monitoring IBM Storage FlashSystem 9100 storage systems

Monitor IBM Storage FlashSystem 9100 storage systems. You can view information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of the storage systems. You can view the savings that are achieved when data is reduced, compressed, and deduplicated. Other features, such as alerting, health monitoring, advanced analytics, and reporting are also supported.

Enhanced support for IBM FlashSystem 900, model AE3 storage system

Prevent your IBM Storage FlashSystem 900 from running out of capacity by monitoring the physical capacity of the storage system. View how much pool capacity is provisioned and the used and available physical capacity for the RAID array.

Tracking the status of ticket tasks

Collecting and uploading logs for tickets can take 20 minutes or more. Use the new icons in the page banner to easily view progress when you create or update tickets.

Adding multiple storage systems

Adding storage systems is now a lot faster: You can add multiple storage systems instead of adding them individually.

Checking your support for block storage systems

Check if you are entitled to support for your block storage systems.

Viewing inventory information for SAN Volume Controller storage systems

View the list of nodes and enclosures in your inventory and the type of enclosure. You can see whether IBM Storage Insights has determined that the node or enclosure has an active maintenance or warranty contract.

Reporting

• From any table view for a storage resource, you can create, customize, and schedule custom reports.
• Create, schedule, and send chargeback reports by email to make the owners of resources, such as applications, departments, or physical servers, aware of the amount and cost of the storage that their resources consume.
• Create storage consumption reports to make the owner of a specific resource aware of the amount and cost of the block storage that their resources consumes.

Other changes

It was called Home. Now, it's called Dashboards. In IBM Storage Insights, it's your operations center for monitoring your block storage in tile or table view, and it's where you can view the custom dashboards that you create. In IBM Storage Insights Pro, not only do you get the Operations center dashboard, but you also have access to the Overview and Alerts dashboards.

Changes in Q2 2018 (June 10)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 2Q 2018:

Allowing IBM® Support to collect logs without contacting you

To save time when IBM® Support is working on your ticket, give IBM® Support permission to collect and upload log packages without contacting you. You can set this permission for each storage system.

Creating customized dashboards to manage your storage

Create customized dashboards to manage selected storage systems in your environment at a glance.

Managing capacity and performance at a glance using the dashboard table

Use the table view of the dashboard to quickly monitor the health, capacity, and performance of a range or all of your storage systems.

Viewing storage system properties and specifying custom tags

Easily access properties information about your storage systems from the dashboard and update the name, location, and custom tags.

Monitoring IBM Storage Virtualize enclosures

View detailed information and Call Home events about the enclosures for block storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize, such as IBM Storage FlashSystem V9000, IBM Storage FlashSystem 900, SAN Volume Controller, and the IBM Storwize family.

Monitoring capacity savings for IBM Storage Virtualize

Use the new overview charts for storage systems to answer key physical capacity, volume capacity, and capacity savings questions:

• How much space is available.
• How much of your thin-provisioned volume space is used.
• How much space you are saving by using compression, deduplication, and thin provisioning.

Enhanced security for support

Blue Diamond Enhanced Secure Support is now integrated with IBM Storage Insights. Clients who need to comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations can now use IBM Storage Insights.

Changes in Q1 2018 (March 11)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 1Q 2018:

Monitoring spare nodes on IBM Storage Virtualize systems 8.1.0 or later

Monitor the availability of clusters by checking which nodes have spare nodes. You can also check the status of the spare nodes, such as which nodes are online and which nodes are on standby.

Monitoring compression metrics for volumes on IBM Storage Virtualize systems

Monitor the workload of compressed volumes on storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize. You can view I/O rate, data rate, and response time metrics for compressed volumes and uncompressed volumes.

Choosing the storage systems you want to monitor

On the dashboard, you can add block storage systems that were not automatically added based on your customer number and add storage systems that you removed but now want to monitor. You can also remove nodes and enclosures that were not assigned to storage systems.

Managing users and their roles

Add and remove IBM Storage Insights Pro users and assign roles. The roles that are assigned to a user determine the product features that are available.

Changes in Q4 2017 (November 19)

Getting support, detecting existing and potential issues, and collecting basic information about your inventory of block storage systems is easier than ever. In the 4Q 2017 update of IBM Storage Insights Pro, you can quickly monitor and assess the basic health, status, and performance of block storage systems. If a problem is detected, you can get help to investigate and troubleshoot the problem and minimize the impact of hardware and software issues before they impact the performance of your critical business applications.

Changes in Q3 2017 (September 10)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 3Q 2017:

Alerting on performance conditions

Use alerts to prevent performance issues from developing into critical situations. For example, you know what the acceptable response times are for the volumes that a critical application uses. To make sure that you are notified if the response times drop below acceptable levels, you define alerts for the volumes so that you know when the warning or critical thresholds that you set are exceeded.

Agentless servers are created automatically

Before, you had to manually create agentless servers to monitor the storage resources that were being consumed by your physical servers. Now, you don't have to because agentless servers are automatically created when your storage systems are probed, which means less configuration and more capacity planning!

Renaming tiers

Change the default names of the tiers that are shown in IBM Storage Insights. For example, you might have tiers such as Tier 0 or Tier 1.5, which are not default tier names. You can now rename the tiers so that they match the names of the tiers in your storage environment.

Modifying the properties of multiple resources

Add or change properties, such as the location or custom tags, for multiple servers or storage systems. You can use the properties to filter or sort the resources in the GUI or in an external application if the data is shared or exported.

Changes in Q2 2017 (June 4)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 2Q 2017:

Viewing capacity metrics for read-intensive flash drives on IBM Storwize

View information about Storwize flash drives by tier in storage pools and volumes. For storage pools, you can view the capacity and available capacity for solid-state drives (Tier 0) and for read-intensive flash storage (Tier 1). For volumes, you can view the capacity for solid-state drives (Tier 0) and for read-intensive flash storage (Tier 1).

Enhancements for IBM Cloud Object Storage

• Add COS Vaults to applications and general groups so you can track how much space is being consumed by logically related vaults and how that consumption trends over time.
• Monitor access risk and storage risk for COS Vaults and COS Slicestor® nodes.
• View information about the tolerance of COS Slicestor nodes to drive failures.
• View information about the tolerance of COS Vaults to drive failures.
• View information about the internal resources of IBM Cloud Object Storage that are used by IBM Storage Scale clusters.

Viewing Unprotected Volumes

View a list of all the primary volumes that are not protected by a copy data relationship. Use this information to identify volumes that might need copy data protection.

Identifying Quorum Disks in a stretched cluster

The Managed Disk page includes a new hidden column that identifies the Active Quorum disk in a stretched cluster.

Viewing the site name of each node in a stretched cluster

See the site name of each node in a stretched cluster. The site name is populated by probes. The site name identifies the physical location of the nodes.

Viewing host connections that are associated with a host or cluster

For DS8000 storage systems, you can now see the hosts and host clusters that host connections belong to.

Viewing port delay performance metrics on IBM Storage Virtualize

View the following port delay metrics for storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize:

• Port Delay Time
• Port Delay I/O Percentage

Use these metrics to investigate whether lack of buffer credits is causing performance problems if the Zero Buffer Credit Timer metric is not available.

Changes in Q1 2017 (March 5)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 1Q 2017:

Monitoring EMC storage systems

View information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of the following EMC storage systems when you add them for monitoring:

• EMC VMAX
• EMC VNX
• EMC VNXe

Support for versions of EMC SMI-S Provider or EMC Solutions Enabler that are compliant with SMI-S 1.6 provides a representative view of VMAX, VNX, and VNXe storage systems. For example, you can view information about:

• Thin provisioning
• Compression
• Meta volumes and private volumes

Gaining insights into the external storage that is used by IBM Storage Scale

• View capacity values for the external storage that clusters and file systems use.
• Check whether you have enough internal space to recall data that was migrated to external storage.

Viewing host connections that are associated with a cluster

For storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize, see the cluster that host connections belong to.

Enhancements for IBM Cloud Object Storage

• View information about the hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and flash modules in COS Slicestor nodes.
• In the Vaults by Accessers chart, you can now clearly see the vaults that cannot be accessed and the vaults that are at risk of access failure.
• In the Vaults by Accessers chart, you can now clearly see the vaults that cannot be accessed and the vaults that are at risk of access failure.

Replication capacity planning

On the new VDisk Mirrors and HyperSwap® pages in the Copy Data panel, you can analyze storage device relationships across your block storage environment to identify how redundancy is affecting available capacity.

Changes in Q4 2016 (December 4)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 4Q 2016:

Enhancing the collection of asset, capacity, and performance metadata

Deploy multiple data collectors to collect and send the data about the storage systems in your data centers to IBM Storage Insights Pro. When you add a storage system, the data collector with the best response time is selected to collect the data. If you install multiple data collectors and a probe or performance monitor fails to collect data from the storage system, the response times for the data collectors are tested again, and the collector with the best response time is activated to collect the data.

Monitoring IBM FlashSystem A9000 and IBM FlashSystem A9000R storage systems

Monitor IBM FlashSystem A9000 and IBM FlashSystem A9000R storage systems. You can view information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of the storage systems. You can view details about the savings that are achieved by data reduction, compression, and data deduplication. You can also view details about the flash drives in the storage systems.

Gaining insights about external storage that is used by IBM Spectrum Scale

View the amount of external storage that is being used by the file systems in a IBM Storage Scale cluster. External storage can be provided by IBM Cloud Object Storage, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), OpenStack Swift, IBM Spectrum Archive, IBM Storage Protect, and other cloud services.

Monitoring IBM Cloud Object Storage

You can now monitor sites, mirrors, and vault quotas for IBM Cloud Object Storage. For example, you can:

• Monitor the capacity and space usage of sites. See which COS Slicestor and COS Accesser® nodes are located at each site and which sites cannot tolerate COS Accesser node failures.
• View the space quotas that are configured for vaults and see whether any vaults are violating the soft or hard quota limits.
• View information about mirrors, such as the pair of vaults in each of the mirrors, and the number of COS Accesser nodes that are configured to access the mirrors. You can also see the storage pools and sites for the vaults in the mirror.

Changes in Q3 2016 (August 28)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 3Q 2016:

Viewing performance metrics for IBM FlashSystem 900

View the following key performance metrics for IBM FlashSystem 900 storage systems:

• Response times
• I/O rates and data rates
• The condition of the storage system

Investigating capacity and space usage trends

Review the capacity charts to detect capacity shortages and investigate trends in storage growth for your tiers. You can view and select capacity metrics in the chart and table views. Use the insights that you gain about space usage in your storage environment to determine when you need more capacity and to identify the storage resources that are underutilized.

Monitoring IBM Cloud Object Storage

Monitor the status, capacity, and space usage of IBM Cloud Object Storage.

Identifying which IBM Storage Scale file systems use cloud storage

Identify which file systems in a Spectrum Scale cluster use external pools for storage. External pools can include storage that is provided by IBM Cloud Object Storage, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), OpenStack Swift, IBM Spectrum Archive, IBM Storage Protect, and other cloud services.

Scheduling probes automatically

Automated probe scheduling simplifies the process of scheduling probes and helps to avoid excessive load on the product server. To minimize the number of concurrent probes, you can define the time window for scheduled automated probes to start. If you want to run a probe at a specific time, you can manually schedule a probe.

Changes in Q2 2016 (June 5)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 2Q 2016:

Identifying performance issues with storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize

Identify key performance metrics that are outside of a standard range on IBM SAN Volume Controller and IBM Storwize storage systems. You can quickly compare the workloads on your storage resources with best practice guidelines.

Exporting performance data for storage systems

Export performance data for storage systems to a compressed file. If you contact IBM Support to help you analyze a performance problem with a storage system, you might be asked to send this file.

Investigating capacity and space usage trends

Review the capacity charts to detect capacity shortages and investigate trends in storage growth for your block, file, and object storage resources. You can review capacity trends for these storage resources:

• Block storage systems, pools, and space-efficient volumes such as compressed, thin-provisioned, and Easy Tier volumes.
• File storage resources such as file systems, file system pools, and filesets.
• Object storage resources such as containers.

Investigating the capacity and space usage of tiered storage

Review the capacity and space usage that the tiered storage in your environment consumes. You can see when your tiered storage will run out of space and the weekly growth rate in storage usage for each tier.

Monitoring groups of resources using general groups

Create general groups to quickly view information about storage resources that have common characteristics. For example, you might group the subset of ports on a SAN Volume Controller storage system that are used for inter-node communication or the storage systems that are used by a critical business application.

Viewing virtualized and non-virtualized capacity

View the values for the capacity of virtualized storage and non-virtualized storage to understand how capacity is used when storage virtualization is implemented in your storage environment.

Viewing the types of resources that are added to applications

View the resource types that were explicitly added to an application or subcomponent in the Members section of the details page.

Changes in Q1 2016 (February 28)

IBM is constantly updating the infrastructure, security, and stability of IBM Storage Insights to improve your experience. Enhanced analytics, troubleshooting capabilities, and general fixes are built-in to this update, so the IBM Support team can better assist you in monitoring your storage environment.

Changes in Q4 2015 (December 13)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 4Q 2015

Monitoring IBM Spectrum Scale performance

You can now view the performance of clusters, nodes, and file systems in IBM Storage Scale. For example, you can:

• Analyze the performance of multiple clusters over a period to determine which clusters have the heaviest I/O loads or the longest response times
• View which of the nodes that mount a file system have the heaviest I/O loads, highest CPU loads, or highest memory usage
• Compare the file systems on a cluster to determine which file systems have the heaviest I/O loads and the longest response times

Monitoring object storage systems

You can now monitor object storage systems on IBM Storage Scale. For example, you can:

• View the GPFS file system that is associated with the object storage system. Combined with the ability to view the relationship between IBM Storage Scale and its SAN-attached storage, you can now troubleshoot all the resource connections in the data path. For example, if you are troubleshooting an object storage problem, you can view the file system that is used by an object container and then view the back-end storage systems that are used by the file system.
• View capacity and space usage for object storage systems and for specific accounts and containers.
• Monitor the object count and space quotas for accounts and containers.
• Plan for capacity by reviewing the capacity growth of GPFS clusters that are used for object storage.

Viewing capacity charts for pools

You can now view charts that show the current and historical capacity of your block storage pools. To check when the available space will run out, based on the historical capacity and space usage trends for the pool, see the value that is shown in the Zero Capacity column.

Checking the capacity that is managed by IBM Storage Insights Pro

You can go to Configuration > Managed Capacity to compare how much capacity is managed by IBM Storage Insights Pro with the total amount of capacity that you are entitled to manage.

Checking the capacity and distribution of volume extents in pools that use Easy Tier

On the Pools page and on the Volumes page, you can now view information about the capacity for each of the drives that Easy Tier can use to tier or distribute volume extents. You can also see the distribution of the volume extents across each Easy Tier drive or tier in the pool, such as the percentage of volume extents on SSDs, on Enterprise HDDs, and on Nearline HHDs.

Checking which volumes are replicated or mirrored

You can see the chart that shows the volumes that are replicated and that are not replicated in your data center. You can also see the number of synchronous and asynchronous replicas, FlashCopy pairs, and VDisk mirrored volumes.

Connecting the data collector to a server or proxy server

You can now specify whether you want to connect to a proxy server when you install the data collector. You can also add the user's credentials to authenticate with the proxy server.

Configuring IBM Storage Insights Pro to comply with FIPS 140-2

You can now configure IBM Storage Insights Pro so that it complies with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2.

Changes in Q3 2015 (August 23)

The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Storage Insights for 3Q 2015:

Gaining insights into IBM Spectrum Accelerate storage systems

You can now gain insights into the capacity, space usage, and performance of IBM Storage Accelerate, which is a software-defined storage system and a member of the IBM Spectrum Storage™ family.

Getting a snapshot of monitored resources on the Dashboard page

On the Dashboard page, you can now see, besides the capacity, reclamation, and tiering charts:

• The number of file and block storage systems that you added for monitoring
• The number of servers that you added for monitoring
• The number of applications that you created to troubleshoot critical applications
• The number of departments that you created to monitor the capacity of the application's storage resources that departments consume

Excluding and including volumes in the tiering analysis

You might not want to get tiering recommendations for some of the volumes in your data center. For example, if you don't want to down-tier volumes that belong to critical applications, you can go to Insights > Tier Planning and exclude the volumes from the tiering analysis.

If you change your mind, you can click the Excluded tab and include the volumes in the tiering analysis.

Viewing information about protocol nodes in GPFS clusters

You can see the protocol nodes for GPFS clusters and the protocols that are supported by the protocol nodes on the Nodes page.

Nodes in GPFS clusters are designated as protocol nodes so that non-GPFS clients can access the data on the GPFS cluster. The following protocols are supported:

• Network File System (NFS)
• Common Internet File Systems (CIFS)
• Object

Information about protocol nodes is available for IBM Storage Scale 4.1.1 or later.