We highlighted a crucial cluster maintenance task in a recent blog post: monitoring cluster performance and storage capacity. Now, we’d like to take a closer look at InsightIQ™—a remarkably useful tool for monitoring your EMC® Isilon® cluster. As a licensed software module for the OneFS® operating system, InsightIQ makes it possible for you to monitor one or more clusters.
InsightIQ provides charts, graphs, and customized reports to help you understand how your cluster is performing. To learn how InsightIQ 3.0 works, watch the EMC Isilon InsightIQ Overview video, where Corporate Systems Engineer Jason Sturgeon describes the architecture of InsightIQ and shows you how to use InsightIQ reports.
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How reports can help with monitoring
InsightIQ enables you to create customized reports to display data about clusters over specific periods of time. There are two general types of reports: performance reports and file system reports.
Performance reports
By monitoring cluster performance and data usage, you can help to ensure that your cluster runs smoothly. In the InsightIQ overview video, learn how to create a performance report to check cluster activity and a file system report to visualize data usage over time.
For example, if your cluster is running slowly, you can run a performance report and review the external network throughput rate. In the following figure, the performance report shows that one node is handling more network traffic than other nodes. With this information, you can redirect network traffic to other nodes and improve cluster performance.
File system report
InsightIQ reports can also help you to monitor cluster data usage by generating a file system report. The video describes a use case where you can explore data growth in a directory over time. For example, after running a file system report you might notice that a directory is storing a large amount of data (see the following figure). If this data hasn’t been accessed for a long time, you can approach the directory owner to determine whether this data can be deleted to increase storage capacity.
For more information about reporting capabilities in InsightIQ, refer to the InsightIQ documentation on the EMC Online Support site (login required).
Start a conversation about Isilon content
Have a question or feedback about Isilon content? Visit the online EMC Isilon Community to start a discussion. If you have questions or feedback about this blog, contact us at isi.knowledge@emc.com. To provide documentation feedback or request new content, contact isicontent@emc.com.