We Give You Insight

Storage monitoring is the process of tracking and managing the performance, capacity, and availability of storage resources in an IT environment. This involves the use of software tools to collect data on various aspects of storage systems, such as disk utilization, input/output operations per second (IOPS), latency, and error rates. The primary goals of storage monitoring are to ensure that storage systems are running efficiently, to detect and resolve issues before they impact users, and to plan for future storage needs.

Key components of storage monitoring include:

Performance Monitoring: Tracking metrics like IOPS, throughput, and latency to ensure that storage systems are meeting performance requirements. This helps in identifying bottlenecks and optimizing storage performance.

Capacity Monitoring: Keeping track of how much storage is being used and how much is available. This helps in preventing over-provisioning or under-provisioning of storage resources.

Availability Monitoring: Ensuring that storage systems are available and operational. This includes monitoring for hardware failures, network issues, and other factors that can cause downtime.

Health Monitoring: Monitoring the health of storage devices, including hard drives, SSDs, and storage controllers. This can involve tracking error rates, temperature, and other indicators of potential hardware failure.

Alerts and Notifications: Setting up alerts and notifications to inform IT administrators of potential issues before they become critical. This can include alerts for high disk utilization, increasing error rates, or nearing capacity limits.

Reporting and Analysis: Generating reports and analyzing trends in storage usage and performance. This helps in making informed decisions about upgrades, maintenance, and future storage needs.

By implementing effective storage monitoring, organizations can optimize the performance of their storage systems, ensure high availability, and make better-informed decisions about capacity planning and resource allocation.

Our unique methodology goes further than realtime monitoring by leveraging predictive monitoring to improve troubleshooting and risk prevention. 
 
Unlike other storage monitoring tools, predictive monitoring enables customers to spend more time preventing problems and enhancing efficiency – while spending less time cleaning up messes.

Predictive monitoring analyzes a proprietary blend of performance, capacity, utilization, and cost metrics that:
 
1. identify and prevent risks before they occur;
2. find and solve existing problems so they can be avoided in the future;
3. uncover hidden opportunities for storage optimization and cost savings.
 
What’s the impact on your bottom-line? Fewer emergencies, more certainty, and more time and money saved.
 
We give you insight – not noise. 

Visual One shines comprehensive observability on multi-vendor storage environments, looking for signs of current or potential risks related to storage performance, capacity, utilization, growth, budgeting, etc.

Through a mix of alerting and reporting, Visual One Intelligence® helps storage administrators, managers, and architects with:

– Outage prevention
– Bottleneck remediation
– Performance enhancements
– Misconfiguration detection and prevention
– Capacity planning
– Migration planning and cost comparisons
– Budget accuracy / preventing unnecessary purchases
– Data reduction forecasting
– Variable growth modeling
– Free space recovery
– Re-tiering and cost efficiency
– Chargeback / showback / business analytics
– User access and device security
– Plus more.

Within traditional storage environments, Visual One also provides insights into SAN switches, unstructured (file) data, backup devices, and databases.

Visual One Intelligence® monitors storage devices including backup, databases, SAN switches, and unstructured (file) data. It is compatible with dozens for devices and vendors, including:

• Brocade
• Cisco
• Commvault
• Dell EMC
• Hitachi Vantara
• HPE
• Lenovo
• Microsoft SQL Server
• NetApp
• Infinidat
• Nutanix
• Oracle
• Pure Storage
• Qumulo
• Rubrik
• Scality
• Synology
• Tintri
• Veeam
• Veritas

Visual One Intelligence® helps with numerous cost savings, cost prevention, and ROI optimization goals. For example:

• Predictive monitoring that anticipates and prevents expensive outages.
• Root-cause analysis and anomaly detection that identify bottlenecks / misconfigurations and recommend performance optimization measures.
• Capacity planning tools that help prevent excess OpEx costs and waste on consumption-based storage contracts.
• Forecasting that anticipates future growth and avoids costly emergency asset purchases.
• Monitoring that identifies hidden or wasted free space which is usable for storage but is not easily noticeable (ex: orphaned storage, volume-locked free space, stale data, etc.)
• Chargeback, showback, and business analytics tools that aid in tracking, predicting, and allocating resource costs.

There are many infrastructure monitoring tools on the market. Some are free, but often only provide insights into certain kinds of devices (for example, devices from a specific vendor). Others are more extensive but can be costly, complicated to set up and manage, and limited in their ability to unify and correlate data from across your entire infrastructure.

Visual One Intelligence® has none of the biases of a native vendor tool. Rather, it centralizes data from all of your multi-vendor storage devices (as well as cloud, compute, and other resources) and analyzes your infrastructure as a single unit. Instead of looking for problems after they occur, Visual One aims to identify potential problems in advance – providing unique insights into prevention, cost optimization, and remediation.

Unlike most infrastructure monitoring tools, application monitoring tools (APMs) go many steps further by providing additional functions – namely including application-level monitoring. For this reason, many organizations have an APM in their tech stack.

While APMs are helpful for other IT goals, they do not provide sufficient infrastructure monitoring. In fact, they are an entirely different kind of tool. By looking at storage environments from the application level, application monitoring tools can’t always provide direct insights into future risks and root causes, relying instead on users to extensively analyze the tools’ data in order to gain actionable insights.

On the other hand, Visual One Intelligence® monitors storage devices directly, tracking disk / CPU / memory data and other performance and configuration indicators to spot problems (and their causes) from miles away. The end result is a tool that is easier and more effective for the precision needs of storage professionals.

That’s why many organizations who use APMs for other functions choose an infrastruture monitoring tool like Visual One Intelligence® as a complementary tool.

Some organizations even find that they don’t need their APM for anything besides what Visual One Intelligence® can provide. In these cases, organizations save money and headaches by replacing their costly APM with Visual One Intelligence®’s simple, user-friendly, and inexpensive platform.

Visual One Intelligence® is SOC 2 Type II compliant. A full copy of the report is available upon request.