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NetApp Cloud Insights Preview, Part 4: Troubleshooting



Thank you for tuning in once again to my blog series on NetApp Cloud Insights. If you haven't seen the previous entries, here are some links:

Part 1 - Installing the Acquisition Unit
Part 2 - Queries, Annotations, and Performance Policies
Part 3 - Applications & Dashboards

In this post, I'm going to cover a really straightforward troubleshooting workflow that you can do within Cloud Insights to help you zero in on the root cause of some VM latency.  We'll start by searching for an asset (a VMware virtual machine in this case) from the search bar at the top of the Cloud Insights dashboard.



We can see a bit of increased latency beginning at approximately 12:00AM that we want to take a look at. On the right-hand side of the screen, Cloud Insights has identified other objects that it believes are correlated with the asset in question. The top correlated object, for example, is the VMware datastore where the VM is located. If we click the checkbox next to the datastore asset, it'll stack the chosen metrics (latency and IOPs for this example) on top of the existing values for the VM. 


You can see from the data above that there is a pretty good chance that increased I/O on the VMware datastore caused the VM latency to increase. 

In this particular case, the SnapMirror schedule for this volume starts at 12:00AM, so this behavior is expected, but it serves to illustrate how useful the data can be for troubleshooting. 

If you notice down in the lower-right, there is a section called "Greedy" - these are resources that are reporting higher-than-normal amounts of IOPs and may be impacting other workloads. It's not shown in the picture, but there is also a "Degraded" section if a troublesome workload is impacting other workloads negatively. 

It's pretty cool how you can layer all this data from multiple systems collected by Cloud Insights together and use it for root cause analysis and troubleshooting with just a few clicks.

This concludes the series on Cloud Insights, but please don't think that what I've covered here is the sum total of what Cloud Insights has to offer - it does SO MUCH more for public cloud monitoring, cost reclamation estimating, VM right-sizing, and more. As you may be aware, Insight 2018 US just wrapped up, where Cloud Insights was officially announced. So if these posts have piqued your interest, head out to cloud.netapp.com and sign up for a free trial of Cloud Insights and see for yourself. 

Thank you for reading!
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