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Storage Performance Troubleshooting

So there is a great article on ALL the different layers and Queues that you should watch in order to figure out where it's queuing to figure out where it may be backing up and thus having latency with your storage performance.   Since SolarWinds can effectively watch all layers Storage, Hypervisor (VMware), OS, SQL Server is there monitoring that SolarWinds does at all these various layers?

ref: VMware I/O queues, micro-bursting, and multipathing - Virtual Geek

  • For the most part the storage metrics being collected are wrapped around iops/throughput/latency.  Out of the box, assuming you have all the relevant licenses, Orion would be monitoring the write latency (shows as disk sec per transfer)and queue depth of all volumes at the monitored OS level for any system using WMI or the Agent.  Then at the vm host level there are metrics collected for latency between the hosts and each datastore, which are also broken out per vm.  No specific queue depths are being collected but if you want to get fancy with SAM you could probably set a monitor up for them if you needed.  At the array level I don't think queue info is being collected either by default, and thats one that I'm not sure how hard it would be to add a queue counter since SMI-S is not a common protocol except to storage admins.

  • Right, that's a bit helpful.  I'm not currently an "admin" of the SolarWinds piece of it but have a more storage perspective at the moment hence the question.   I don't think we are using the agent or wmi as that from what the admin told me it used too much CPU?  so I think he is gathering more via SNMP instead which I am not sure would include all of the metrics needed really to get at all the various layers of queues to really see where it's backing up.  Although, thinking he may be convinced if we can get additional data via the agent but then that will be a bit of a process to get that deployed.  We do have most of the licenses including the storage-specific license so we are getting data from our storage array but more concerned about the Network, Hypervisor (VMware) Layer, the VMDK layer, the OS layer, the NTFS layer, the Application Layer  which in most cases turns out to be SQL Databases that get "slow' if you will.   So it would really be nice to see all these layers presented in some sort of dashboard and can dashboards be shared amongst the community?

  • Technically using WMI uses more CPU/bandwidth than SNMP, but we are normally talking about pretty trivial differences in most cases and if the stats you want are only available in SNMP it pretty much forces the decision anyway.

    SNMP vs WMI polling - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

    On the other hand, the agent is the most efficient method of all, but as you mentioned getting that deployed is another headache to deal with.

    Polling Using WMI versus the new Agent

    This kb outlines all the little differences between what is available from different polling methods

    Comparison of Windows agent versus agentless - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

    There is no mechanism for exporting dashboards at this point, but you can export reports (which can have all the same content as a dashboard would).

    I've built tons of dashboards around different areas of focus but never one quite like your article describes.  Something could be cooked up though if someone wanted to.

  • It's a bit interesting that the Agent doesn't do everything, however, it has a bit more capability than the other 2 aka 92.5 vs. 89 ( WMI ), and 89 ( SNMP ) as far as features it supports.

    You're right though I wouldn't think it would be much different in CPU and not worth really worrying about the difference as if you need the features of the agent you need the agent.   I suppose you could probably do both the agent and wmi or snmp to get the most features?

    Reports?   May have to look to see how easy those are to create.   I wonder if there is a place where people also share them?  Perhaps have done some reporting for storage performance or for any of the various levels separately that could be combined into one report with a bit of work?