BVQ for Netapp ONTAP Platform

BVQ for NetApp Ontap use cases

BVQ for NetApp ONTAP finds answers to your typical use cases around that platform:

• Get insight into favourite ONTAP features like Fabric Pools, SnapMirror, SnapVault, Flash Pools, Flash Cache, FC/iSCSI Block storage, FC/IP Metro cluster
• Do I have enough spare drives or partitions available to cover failed drives?
• What dependencies are between my VMware or IBM PowerVM LPARs and my NetApp FC/iSCSI Block storage LUNs or NFS shares (Workload? Capacity?)
• Are there bottlenecks in the internal data flow inside my NetApp cluster (FC or Ethernet ports? Node cache or CPU? Data reduction layers?)
• When and where are bottlenecks for my CIFS and NFS shares?
• When do I need to extent my capacity?
• Is my configuration according to best practices?

Information gathering

BVQ scans topology and performance informations from the REST API of each NetApp ONTAP storage system.

What information is collected?

• Topology configuration information
  • Scanned every 1 hour (default)
  • 47 object types containing a total of ~575 attributes:
    Clusters, Nodes, RAID groups, Aggregates, SVMs, LAN/SAN interfaces, Volumes, Shares, ...
    
    
• Performance statistics
  • Scanned every ? minutes (default) (?? seconds interval averages)
  • 8 object types containing a total of ~329 performance statistics

Additional information:

• See Supported NetApp ONTAP systems (SW)  for more information about which HMC and Power Systems HW/SW versions are supported.
• See Getting started - Scanner for more Information about BVQ Scanner configuration.
• See NetApp ONTAP preparation for additional Cluster preparation tasks.
• See BVQ for NetApp ONTAP scan data BVQ Offline Scanner information for more details.

End to end inter platform relations

The BVQ NetApp ONTAP platform model is interconnected to the following other platform models supported by BVQ. With that all NetApp ONTAP objects can be combined in an end to end relationship to objects of these platforms.

Object types

The following overview shows the elementary relationships of physical and logical objects:

          Legend: Gray colored objects are visible, light gray invisible, red bordered ones contain performance statistics

Predefined system health checks

The health of your NetApp ONTAP systems is shown in the BVQ Systems Health Map inside the Web UI of the BVQ Server.

We started with a set of ~20 general rules permanently checking your systems. Of course you can add your own customized health check rules there, tailored to your environment.

See Predefined Alerts and tests for BVQ Systems Health map for more details.

Predefined web dashboards

BVQ Web Dashboards are based on our BVQ Datasource Plugin for Grafana. We streamlined the experience from many of our SVA NetApp ONTAP Experts to predefine three essential dashboards to provide an overview across configuration, capacity and performance:

See BVQ for NetApp ONTAP monitoring dashboards for more details.

Predefined reports

Our expert NetApp ONTAP team designed some reports to provide a general overview about that platform.

See BVQ for NetApp ONTAP reports for more details.

BVQ Expert GUI representation

All objects, attributes and statistics of this platform can be interactively browsed within the BVQ Expert GUI. We assembled 3 predefined and commented BVQ Multi view favourites to give you a first overview about your configuration, performance and capacity. We will add more as soon, as we identify additional general use cases.

Where to find NetApp ONTAP objects?

Similar to all other objects, they show up in the Path browser inside the property panel of the BVQ Expert GUI or can be opened as a Table view from the BVQ Favourite browser.

Object attributes

BVQ displays all interesting attributes provided. Please explore the BVQ Netapp Table view favourites to get an impression of the most important attributes.

Performance and error statistics

The BVQ NetApp ONTAP module gathers major important statistics delivered from ONTAP via ZAPI.

Typical questions around performance, load and utilization are answered by BVQ:

• Which Volumes or Aggregates are overloaded and show high latencies?
• Is there a congestion at an attached SAN port?
• Which Volume or SVM puts a heavy load on my cluster?
• Does an latency peak have influence on the performance of an Aggregate?
• Is the FC host performance affected by slow drainers in the SAN?
• What Volume causes peak overloads in my Aggregate?

To view performance statistics for one or multiple objects, simply select the objects and open the performance view. There you can choose the metrics you are interested in from the properties panel: