Overview

Enterprise monitoring requires end-to-end visibility of critical workloads. High-level monitoring and alerting are necessary to alert and notify the proper staff about immediate issues or trends that require attention.

Dell PowerStore collects a wealth of performance metrics to help you monitor and manage your mission-critical storage resources. You can easily view these metrics in PowerStore Manager and CloudIQ for an in-depth look at PowerStore.

PowerStore can also integrate with external tools using open source for monitoring and management. Enterprise monitoring tools such as Zabbix and Grafana allow you to monitor various infrastructure components in a single pane of glass.

Exposing performance metrics

The Metrics Exporter for Dell PowerStore allows customers to extend PowerStore Manager metrics functionality or to integrate it with popular enterprise monitoring software. The Metrics Exporter for Dell PowerStore is an open-source tool that allows enterprise monitoring tools such as Zabbix and Grafana to consume PowerStore performance metrics. PowerStore Exporter leverages the PowerStore REST API to capture performance metrics. PowerStore Exporter captures and publishes the metrics to the popular open-source event monitoring software Prometheus. When PowerStore performance data is stored in a Prometheus time-series database (TSDB), it can be used for monitoring and alerting directly through Prometheus, or used as a data source by popular open-source monitoring software that supports Prometheus, such as Zabbix and Grafana.

Some of the PowerStore metrics categories that are available include:

• Battery
• Hard Drive
• Network port
• Fan
• Power supply
• Appliance performance
• Volume performance
• Capacity
• Data savings

Zabbix example

Dell Technologies is one of many companies that uses Zabbix for monitoring its IT infrastructure. The following is an example of PowerStore appliance IOPS being accessed, using the PowerStore Exporter and displayed in Zabbix.

Figure 1.  PowerStore Metrics in Zabbix

This is just one example of PowerStore appliance metrics as viewed in Zabbix. Any of the dozens of performance metrics provided by PowerStore can be consumed by Zabbix.

Grafana example

Grafana is another popular tool for creating performance dashboards. The PowerStore Exporter includes a sample dashboard to get started.

Figure 2.  PowerStore metrics in Grafana

Container Storage Modules

Kubernetes (K8s) is becoming a popular platform for running enterprise applications. Dell Technologies supports PowerStore on K8s with Dell Technologies Container Storage Modules. One of these modules is the Container Storage Module for Observability that also publishes data to Prometheus.

Together with the Metrics Exporter for Dell PowerStore, both PowerStore appliance and host storage statistics can be viewed in the same Grafana dashboard for Windows, Linux, and K8s environments.

Summary

Dell Technologies provides PowerStore integration for end-to-end enterprise monitoring in your monitoring tool of choice. Publishing PowerStore metrics to a popular open-source tool, Prometheus, enables single pane of glass monitoring of PowerStore alongside your other critical infrastructure.