Path based charting

Since BVQ Version 5.0 it is possible to display a table (Treetable) below the Treemap. Now we went one step further and extended the Topology view with the option to add a performance chart to interact with the objects visible in Treemap or Treetable. This enhances the possibilities to select and restrict objects based on dynamic filters and selected conditions. Now there are three views available to be displayed in the Toplology view: Treemap, Treetable and Chart. Currently you can display two of them simultaneously in ever combination.

One of the most useful extensions with this feature is the possibility to show multiple aggregated metrics. Aggregated metrics are always calculated based on the objects visible in the Treemap or Treetable. In combination with the new Enhanced Filtering the views can be made highly dynamic and reusable as favorites for specific use cases.
To manage the objects visible in the chart a Chart visibility Context menu was added for Treemap and Treetable objects.

Usage example:

Null object

The validity of information a BVQ or SVC object can provide is highly dependent on relations to other objects in many situations. The BVQ path browser reflects these relationships since the beginning but was only capable of displaying objects that fulfill all relations. The NULL Object is able to soften this restrictions and provide a way to display objects that don't meet all requirements. This is really useful to find objects that aren't configured correctly or aren't accessible through a usual path. The Null Object is always displayed as undef.

Examples:

• Show all MDisks that are not part of an MDisk Group
• Group objects without a site or room

Example: Hosts grouped by Room and Site

All Hosts that aren't assigned to any room are grouped in a Site undef. and Room undef. None of them has been visible in previous versions.

Enhanced filtering

Since version 5.0 it is possible to use basic filter options inside the Topology View. This type of filter was restricted to direct object attributes which could be connected with AND conditions.
The new enhanced filtering added a lot of additional filter options to specify filters that exactly fit your needs even if they are highly complex.

Features:

• Compare different object attributes with each other
• Compare object attributes with context attributes (subelementcount, subelementsize, etc)
• Concatenate with AND, OR, NOT, XOR
• Graphical editor to support condition creation
• Selective enable/disable filter conditions

Example:
How to filter Clusters and MDisk groups that contain VDisks with a virtual capacity greater than 500GiB or with more than 500 IO/s in average the last day

Integrated Help

Video Introduction

Web dashboard

The BVQ Web Dashboard is based on Grafana, which is one of the leading open source software tools to visualize time series data that can interact with different data sources (https://grafana.com/).
The BVQ Server now provides an API to access most performance metrics you know from the BVQ GUI, to visualize them in Grafana. Therefore, you have the option to install a preconfigured Grafana with some default Dashboards inside the BVQ Server. This offers a great possibility to view general "realtime" information directly in the browser without the need to open the BVQ GUI.

REST API

Microsoft Excel is the most important and flexible Reporting Tool. Manifold opportunities to create tables, charts, calculations, etc. bundled with a variety of different skills makes it useful in a lot of different situations. Excel provides a wide range of options to import data from different formats in files, databases or API's.

BVQ now provides an API to connect Excel to Topology information based on favorites located in "All Users". The information can be displayed in a Treetable and imported into Excel for further processing.

Use cases:

• Asset management
• Controlling
• Enrichment with additional data
• Report exchange

To access and explore the API endpoints, the BVQ-Server provides an overview page to display the required URL and all information connected to the favorite.

Reporting → Data sources

New Scanner module

The scanner module has been revised completely to simplify adding, updating and changing settings for individual scanner and support more systems to be scanned. Therefore the scanner has been moved into one dedicated service that will perform the work for multiple systems with less resource utilization.

To manage the scanner the BVQ-Server provides an easy to use Web UI.

Settings for VMware and SVC scanner vary in some details but are comparable to the known settings from previous BVQ scanner.

To show the log files for a scanner, click the blue "log icon" in the overview page. The logs will be presented in 1h buckets with additional coloring for WARN and ERROR messages.

All way pathing

You are now able to combine all objects in a meaningful path. This is enabled by using graphs internally.

Favorite-menu

In the last BVQ Releases favorites became more and more important. To make them accessible more easily, we added a "Favorites"-option directly to the BVQ Main menu. All previous methods to open a favorite are still available.

Additionally, we removed the old obsolete Table View menu and added a Table view section to the system favorites. They are now enriched with a lot of additional meaningful content and supported with documentation and links to further information.

Thin coverage ratio

New attribute "Coverage %" shows the ratio of over-allocated thin capacity covered by a pool or cluster. You can set an alert on it to be warned before you run out of space due to thin space allocation eating up all your free space.

In the example above, thin provisioned volumes could potentially fill unused 60TB, but this is only covered by 30TB of free space in the providing pools. Thus the coverage ratio is only 50%. Coverage ratio is available in object types aggregating MDisk groups (Pools) like Storage classes, Mobility zones and in such aggregating VDisks like Hosts, VDisk groups, or Applications.

Retrospective tabular reports