Storage systems are one of the most critical components of IT infrastructure, and their availability and performance are essential for business continuity. However, monitoring and managing storage systems can be challenging, especially in large and complex environments with multiple devices from different vendors.
STOR2RRD is a comprehensive monitoring solution that provides visibility into storage systems from multiple vendors, enabling IT professionals to proactively monitor and manage storage systems effectively. In this blog post, we will explore STOR2RRD in details and its features that make it an excellent monitoring solution for storage systems, as well as SAN and LAN switches.
What is STOR2RRD?
STOR2RRD is a cool open-source monitoring solution that is free by itself, the value-added part comes from Xorux that helps with the support, regular health checks, reporting. In fact, when you buy support package, you'll get an enterprise edition of the product that includes a lot more than the free, open source one. You can, btw, check their offering here. Xorux is an independent company that is not dependent on any hardware vendor, but supports a very large list of them.
STOR2RRD provides performance and capacity monitoring for various storage systems from multiple vendors, including IBM, Dell EMC, NetApp, HPE, Hitachi, QNAP, Pure Storage, with support for LAN and SAN switches, but also software such Microsoft, FreeNAS or Ceph. (btw the support matrix is impressive !!!) STOR2RRD collects data from storage systems and presents it in a web-based dashboard, enabling IT professionals to monitor storage systems' health and performance in real-time.
STOR2RRD is a lightweight and scalable monitoring solution that can monitor storage systems with thousands of disks and hundreds of hosts. It can be installed on a Linux or Unix server, and it uses SNMP and API to collect data from storage systems, making it compatible with various storage systems. You can download version for VMware vSphere/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, install it directly on a Linux host or have it running as a Docker container in the cloud.
Features of STOR2RRD
STOR2RRD offers a wide range of features that make it a comprehensive monitoring solution for storage systems. Here are some of its essential features:
Real-time Monitoring – STOR2RRD provides real-time monitoring of storage systems, enabling IT professionals to monitor storage systems' performance and capacity in real-time. Real-time monitoring helps IT professionals detect issues quickly and take action before they affect storage systems' performance and availability. If failure is detected, you get an alert that can be pushed through email, SNMP, Nagios or external bash script.
Example of a heatmap view
That feature shows actual utilization of all SAN ports, storage pools and volumes in the table where each item has color based on its response time during last hour.
Multi-vendor Support – STOR2RRD supports various storage systems from multiple vendors, including IBM, Dell EMC, NetApp, HPE, Hitachi, and others. The UI and the support is provided by Xorux that is an independent company that supports pretty much every vendor you can imagine. This makes it a versatile monitoring solution that can be used in large and complex environments with multiple storage systems from different vendors.
Capacity Planning – STOR2RRD provides capacity planning features that enable IT professionals to predict storage systems' capacity increase over time, and plan accordingly. Capacity planning helps IT professionals optimize storage systems' usage and prevent storage-related performance issues.
There is also possibility to see overall capacity for all devices in one single pane of glass even for multiple vendors with possibility do drill down on pool level.
Historical Reporting – STOR2RRD provides historical reporting features that enable IT professionals to analyze storage systems' performance over time. Historical reporting helps the IT to identify trends and patterns in storage systems' performance and capacity usage, enabling them to optimize storage systems' usage.
Alerting – STOR2RRD provides alerting features that enable IT professionals to configure alerts for storage systems' performance and capacity issues. Alerting helps IT professionals detect issues quickly and take action before they affect storage systems' performance and availability. You can configure Nagios to pick up alarms from STOR2RRD via standard NRPE module, also e-mail, or via external shell script.
Customization – STOR2RRD provides customization features that enable IT professionals to customize the monitoring tool according to their business or technical requirements. Customization helps IT professionals focus on the most critical metrics and information and monitor storage systems effectively with a possibility to export data into third party tools.
Easy Integration – STOR2RRD is easy to integrate with various storage systems, and it supports mainly API-based data collection. This makes it compatible with various storage systems and easy to integrate into existing IT infrastructure.
How can STOR2RRD help you in your environment?
STOR2RRD uses API-based data collection to collect data from storage systems. It collects data at regular intervals and stores it in a database. The data is then processed and presented in a web-based dashboard, enabling IT professionals to monitor storage systems' health and performance.
STOR2RRD has build-in alerting feature that upon reaching a performance thresholds, you can define alarms for any storage and its volumes, pools or host. When alert is triggered, you know that there is a performance issue somewhere. By drilling-down on the details you can find out exactly if it comes from individual volume, device as a whole or SAN port or a whole switch. The monitored metrics are numerous, such as IO (read and write), data throughput (read and write), response time, latency or so.
SAN Monitoring – To find some problem on SAN environment is just matter of seconds. You can just check overall error statistics on whole SAN infrastructure for almost any error metrics such as B2B credits, CRC errors. link fails, etc. Then just click on switch with highest value and you immediately see problem port with all related history.
Custom Groups – Another unique features are Custom Groups. Where you can create your own group of Volumes, Pools or SAN ports even across multiple physical devices and see overall performance for these grouped items. For example if you have 10 volumes assigned to specific DB, you can group them, or all SAN ports related to tape library, you name it.
Final Words
SOR2RRD is a Free, OpenSource monitoring solution for many storage solution (hardware and software) that helps with monitoring, capacity planning and debugging performance. With Enterprise Edition version from Xorux, you get much more, including necessary support in case something bad happens to your environment and you need to find out quickly what's going on.
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