Viewing status information e-Learning course

This e-Learning module will help you learn how to view system status information for the Lenovo(R) Storage family of products. Status information can help you detect problems and verify that tasks have been completed.

You can use the management GUI to gather information about system performance and the status of drives, nodes, hosts, volumes, pools, and Copy Services. Let us look at a few commonly used system views.

To view the status of the system, go to the System panel. You will see a visual representation of your hardware. The circular disk directly below the enclosure displays allocated and physical capacity of the system. In addition to the management GUI, LED indicators on the system hardware can also provide status information. To learn more, see the Hardware Monitoring e-Learning module. You can use the management GUI to gather information about system performance and the status of drives, nodes, hosts, volumes, pools, and Copy Services. Let us look at a few commonly used system views.

Go to the Performance panel to monitor system performance statistics, including information about CPU usage, interface connectivity, and bandwidth for volumes and pools, which are Mdisks groups. You can use these statistics to monitor the overall health and performance of your system.

You can use the System panel to access technical details related to the system, including drive status. Hover over a specific enclosure and a pop-up is displayed showing online status. Right click on the drive, choose Properties from the dropdown option, then click View More Details. Additional status information about the drive is displayed.

There are two types of events: messages and alerts. Messages provide information about system operations. A message can indicate, for example, that an IBM FlashCopy(R) operation has completed. Alerts indicate error conditions that require action or warnings that action might soon be required. Alerts can indicate, for example, that a disk has failed or a thin-provisioned volume is approaching full capacity.

Go to the Events panel to view events that have alerts. The events are listed in the order that they should be fixed. The error that is the highest priority is displayed in the Next Recommended Action box at the top of the panel. To run the recommended fix procedure for this event, click Run This Fix Procedure. To run the fix procedure for a different event, select the event from the list, then click Actions > Run Fix Procedure. This takes you through the necessary fix procedure steps for the selected event.

You can go to the System Details panel to view status information for enclosures, power supply units, node canisters, and other components. Right click on the desired enclosure and choose Properties from the dropdown options to obtain detailed information including the number of enclosures, I/O groups, topology, internal capacity, and power usage.

Go to the Hosts panel to view a list of your hosts and the host type, number of ports, and whether host mappings exist. Select a host and Actions > Properties to view more detailed information. Mappings are displayed in the Mapped Volumes panel. You can view status information about each of the host ports in the Port Definitions panel.

To view status information about individual volumes, go to the Volume by Pools or the Volumes by Host panel. Right click on a selected volume and choose Properties from the dropdown options. A table containing volume status, capacity, preferred nodes, and other volume information is displayed.

In the Volumes by Pool panel, you can also view the volume allocation for a specific storage pool.

Use the MDisks by Pools panel to view the status of individual managed disks. Note that if a managed disk is not online, it might cause multiple volumes to be offline.

Use the FlashCopy panel to view the status and progress of an IBM FlashCopy(R) operation. You can also view the status and progress of a FlashCopy operation in the Consistency Groups and FlashCopy Mappings panels.

In this module, you learned how to view status information and performance data. To learn more, see the other topics in IBM Knowledge Center.