Tag: pmdb

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Six plus data center software defined management dashboards tools

Software defined data infrastructure management insight tools

server storage I/O trends

Updated 1/17/2018

Managing data infrastructures involves using software defined management dashboards tools. Recently I found in my inbox a link to a piece 6 Dashboards for Managing Every Modern Data Center that caught my attention. I was hoping to see who the six different datacenter technologies, dashboard solutions tools were instead of finding list of dashboard considerations for modern data centers and data infrastructures.

Turns out the piece was nothing more than a list of six items featured as part of the vendors (Sunbird) piece about what to look for in a dashboard (e.g. their product). Sure there were some of the usual key performance indicator (KPI) associated with or related to IT Service Management (ITSM), Data Center Infrastructure (Insight/Information) Management (DCIM), Configuration and Change management databases (CMDB), availability, capacity and Performance Management Databases (PMDB) among others.

  • Space
  • Inventory
  • Connectivity
  • Change
  • Environment
  • Power

Dashboard Discussions

Keep in mind however that there are many different types of dashboards (and consoles), some are active along with analytics including correlation, others are passive simply displaying. The focus area also various from physical data center facilities, to applications, to data infrastructures or components such as servers, storage, I/O networks, clouds, virtual, containers among others modern data centers.

Data Infrastructures and SDDI, SDDC, SDI
Data Infrastructures (hardware, software, services, servers, storage, I/O and networks)

This is where some context comes into play as there are different types of dashboards for various audience, technology and focus areas (e.g. domains) across data infrastructure (and other entities). For example do a google search of “dashboard” and see what appears, or “IT dashboard”, “data center dashboard” vs. “datacenter dashboard” among others.

Additional KPIs include:

  • Performance, availability, Capacity and Economic (PACE) attributes
  • Service Level Objectives (SLO), Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
  • Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), Recovery Point Objectives (SLO)
  • IT Service Management (ITSM) and Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)
  • Configuration and Change Management (e.g. things part of CMDB)
  • Performance, availability and capacity (e.g. things part of PMDB)
  • Various focus and layers, cross domain functionality views
  • Costs management including subscriptions, licenses and others

IT Data Center and Data Infrastructure Dashboard Options

For those of you who have made it this far, while not a comprehensive list, the following are some examples of vendors, services or solutions that either are, or have an association with data center, as well as data infrastructure management. Some dashboards or tools are homogenous in that they only work within a given area of focus such as particular cloud, service provider, vendor or solution set. Others are heterogeneous or federated working across different services, solutions, vendors and domain focus areas. Think of these as software defined management (SDM), or, software defined data infrastructure (SDDI) management, software defined data center (SDDC) management among other variations for the modern information factory.

There is a mix of tools that run on site (e.g. on premise) or via cloud services (e.g. manager your on site from the cloud). Likewise, some are for fee, others subscription and some are open source. In addition some of the tools are turnkey while others are do it yourself (DiY) or allow you to customize. Also keep in mind that depending on what your tradecraft (skills, experience, expertise) interest area is, these may or may not be applicable to you, while relevant to others. For example some such as Spiceworks tend to be more helpdesk focused while others on other data center or data infrastructure areas.

There are dashboards for or from AWS, Canonical (Ubuntu), Dell including EMC, Google, HPE, IBM, Microsoft System Center and Azure, NetApp, OpenStack, Oracle, Rackspace, Redhat, Rightscale, Servicenow, Softlayer, Suse and VMware among others.

Blue Medora (various data infrastructure monitoring)
Cloudkitty (open source cloud rating and chargeback)
Collectd (data infrastructure collection and monitoring)
cPanel and whm (web and hosting dashboards)
data infrastructure sddi cpanel

Dashbuilder (customize your dashboard)
Datadog (super easy to get access, download, install, configure and use)
Domo (various data infrastructure monitoring tools)
Extrahop (still waiting to be able to download and try their bits vs. watching a demo)
Firescope (data infrastructure insight and awareness)
Freezer (open source dashboard tools)
Komprise (interesting solution, would like try, however lots of gated material)
Nagios (data infrastructure monitoring)
Openit (data infrastructure tracking, report, monitoring)
Opvizor (data infrastructure monitoring and reporting)

storageio datadog dashboard

Panorama9 (various data infrastructure monitoring and reporting)
Quest (various tools)
Redhat Cloudforms (openstack and cloud management)
Rrdtools (data collection, logging and display)
Sisense (insight and awareness tools)
Solarwinds Server Application Monitor (SAM) among other tools
Teamquest (various monitoring, management, capacity planning tools)
Turbomomic (software defined data infrastructure insight tools)
Virtual Instruments (various monitoring and insight awareness along with analytics)

In addition to the above, there are tools such as Splunk among others that also provide insight and awareness to help avoid flying blind while managing your data center or data infrastructure.

Where to learn more

Learn more via the following links.

  • Data Infrastructure Primer and Overview (Its Whats Inside The Data Center)
  • E2E Awareness and insight for IT environments
  • Server and Storage I/O Benchmarking and Performance Resources
  • Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) and IRM
  • The Value of Infrastructure Insight – Enabling Informed Decision Making
  • More storage and IO metrics that matter
  • Whats a data infrastructure?

    • Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

    What this all means

    Without insight and awareness you are flying blind, how can you make informed decisions about your information factory, data infrastructures, data center along with applications. There are different focus areas for various audiences up and down the stack layers in data infrastructures and data centers. Key is having insight and awareness including knowing what are some different tool options.

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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    Server and Storage I/O Benchmarking 101 for Smarties

    Server Storage I/O Benchmarking 101 for Smarties or dummies ;)

    server storage I/O trends

    This is the first of a series of posts and links to resources on server storage I/O performance and benchmarking (view more and follow-up posts here).

    The best I/O is the I/O that you do not have to do, the second best is the one with the least impact as well as low overhead.

    server storage I/O performance

    Drew Robb (@robbdrew) has a Data Storage Benchmarking Guide article over at Enterprise Storage Forum that provides a good framework and summary quick guide to server storage I/O benchmarking.

    Via Drew:

    Data storage benchmarking can be quite esoteric in that vast complexity awaits anyone attempting to get to the heart of a particular benchmark.

    Case in point: The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has developed the Emerald benchmark to measure power consumption. This invaluable benchmark has a vast amount of supporting literature. That so much could be written about one benchmark test tells you just how technical a subject this is. And in SNIA’s defense, it is creating a Quick Reference Guide for Emerald (coming soon).

    But rather than getting into the nitty-gritty nuances of the tests, the purpose of this article is to provide a high-level overview of a few basic storage benchmarks, what value they might have and where you can find out more. 

    Read more here including some of my comments, tips and recommendations.

    Drew’s provides a good summary and overview in his article which is a great opener for this first post in a series on server storage I/O benchmarking and related resources.

    You can think of this series (along with Drew’s article) as server storage I/O benchmarking fundamentals (e.g. 101) for smarties (e.g. non-dummies ;) ).

    Note that even if you are not a server, storage or I/O expert, you can still be considered a smarty vs. a dummy if you found the need or interest to read as well as learn more about benchmarking, metrics that matter, tools, technology and related topics.

    Server and Storage I/O benchmarking 101

    There are different reasons for benchmarking, such as, you might be asked or want to know how many IOPs per disk, Solid State Device (SSD), device or storage system such as for a 15K RPM (revolutions per minute) 146GB SAS Hard Disk Drive (HDD). Sure you can go to a manufactures website and look at the speeds and feeds (technical performance numbers) however are those metrics applicable to your environments applications or workload?

    You might get higher IOPs with smaller IO size on sequential reads vs. random writes which will also depend on what the HDD is attached to. For example are you going to attach the HDD to a storage system or appliance with RAID and caching? Are you going to attach the HDD to a PCIe RAID card or will it be part of a server or storage system. Or are you simply going to put the HDD into a server or workstation and use as a drive without any RAID or performance acceleration.

    What this all means is understanding what it is that you want to benchmark test to learn what the system, solution, service or specific device can do under different workload conditions.

    Some benchmark and related topics include

    • What are you trying to benchmark
    • Why do you need to benchmark something
    • What are some server storage I/O benchmark tools
    • What is the best benchmark tool
    • What to benchmark, how to use tools
    • What are the metrics that matter
    • What is benchmark context why does it matter
    • What are marketing hero benchmark results
    • What to do with your benchmark results

      • server storage I/O benchmark step test
      Example of a step test results with various workers and workload

    • What do the various metrics mean (can we get a side of context with them metrics?)
    • Why look at server CPU if doing storage and I/O networking tests
    • Where and how to profile your application workloads
    • What about physical vs. virtual vs. cloud and software defined benchmarking
    • How to benchmark block DAS or SAN, file NAS, object, cloud, databases and other things
    • Avoiding common benchmark mistakes
    • Tips, recommendations, things to watch out for
    • What to do next

    server storage I/O trends

    Where to learn more

    The following are related links to read more about server (cloud, virtual and physical) storage I/O benchmarking tools, technologies and techniques.

    Drew Robb’s benchmarking quick reference guide
    Server storage I/O benchmarking tools, technologies and techniques resource page
    Server and Storage I/O Benchmarking 101 for Smarties.
    Microsoft Diskspd download and Microsoft Diskspd overview (via Technet)
    I/O, I/O how well do you know about good or bad server and storage I/Os?
    Server and Storage I/O Benchmark Tools: Microsoft Diskspd (Part I and Part II)

    Wrap up and summary

    We have just scratched the surface when it comes to benchmarking cloud, virtual and physical server storage I/O and networking hardware, software along with associated tools, techniques and technologies. However hopefully this and the links for more reading mentioned above give a basis for connecting the dots of what you already know or enable learning more about workloads, synthetic generation and real-world workloads, benchmarks and associated topics. Needless to say there are many more things that we will cover in future posts (e.g. keep an eye on and bookmark the server storage I/O benchmark tools and resources page here).

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved