Hi! I have a question regarding Data Sense. Does it allow me to create or assign an application tag and link servers to it, so that I can track how much storage space each specific application is using? If DataSense isn’t capable of this, can you recommend any other tool that can achieve this kind of functionality? I’m interested in solutions that work in the context of NFS and CIFS protocols.
#DataSense Application information
vocal frigate
tawny stump
You can filter on Storage Repositories (basically the volume in ONTAP) in the Investigation view, so if there's a naming convention that you can use that tells you the application then you can save those filters to Policies and easily get the amount of files and storage they consume.
If you need more details (for instance how much actual storage is consumed when storage efficiencies have been applied) and the possibility to link certain hosts/vm's to a volume in order to figure out the application then you probably want to try out Cloud Insights. Chargeback on a business- or application-level is one of the major use-cases for Cloud Insights.
vocal frigate
Thanks. Do you know what is the granulity in Cloud Insights ? Can I link NFS exports and CIFS shares with an application and get utilizatrion with efficiencies and without ?
tawny stump
Let's start with capacity utilisation. If the export or share is on the volume then you easily get regular total and used data, but you can also get dedupe and compression savings, amount of cold data and more. If the export or share is on a qtree you can only get used if you have a tracking quote set. But this is ONTAP stuff really, not something that Cloud Insights is in control of. To link the volume (or qtree) to an application we need to find a some logic to make that happen. In Cloud Insights you have annotations and you can create an annotation rule that, for instance, based on the name of the volume assigns a specific application. ONTAP and/or Cloud Insights isn't really aware of the applications that you are using, so this needs to be set. Once you have it set you can create dashboards and reports and specify that you want the total consumption for specific application and it it will, thanks to the annotation, summarise that for you.
Hope that makes sense. 🙂
tawny stump
Last thing, you can register a trial for Cloud Insights for free.
During trial you'll get all the nice features. During the trial period you have the option to stick to the Premium edition by buying a subscription or you can "downgrade" to the basic edition. For what you're looking to do it sounds like Basic might be enough. Basic only lets you monitor NetApp stuff while Premium includes a big selection of different collectors.