IBM Storage Insights in 1Q23 Includes Intelligent Capacity Forecasting and Support for Monitoring IBM Storage Ceph

By Christopher King, IBM Corp.

Building on the momentum of 2022, IBM Storage Insights is showing no signs of slowing down in 2023. This cloud-based service for monitoring enterprise storage and devices just got enhancements that are sure to make your storage management life a bit easier.

In 1Q, you can now peer into the future by intelligently forecasting your future capacity needs, monitor even more devices with the inclusion of IBM Storage Ceph, and explore the new bells and whistles for existing features such as the STaaS dashboard and monitoring devices without a data collector.

Peer into future of storage needs
Planning for your future capacity needs is an important part of ensuring that your operations keep running smoothly as your organization grows. With the rapid proliferation of applications and devices into every aspect of business, the demand for storage has never been higher

To help you stay ahead of demand, avoid critical capacity shortages, and make more informed purchasing decisions, you now have the ability to forecast your future capacity needs based on analysis of your historical capacity usage.

By using past metrics and advanced formulas, you can project, chart, and report on future capacity usage for block storage systems, file storage systems, pools (by tier), and STaaS environments.

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For more flexibility in Storage Insights Pro, change the time range of the calculations by looking as far back as 2 years for historical metadata and project as far as 3 years into the future. In Storage Insights, you are limited to block storage systems and one year of historical metadata for your projections. You can also adjust the forecasting projections to incorporate your expectations of storage demand based on personal expertise and knowledge of upcoming changes within your organization.

Monitoring IBM Storage Ceph
In today’s crowded storage market, you have many options for how and where to store your data. One of the key challenges for any organization is to manage all that disparate storage efficiently and with a proactive approach to solving problems when they occur. That’s where Storage Insights steps in. It was built as a single pane of glass for monitoring and troubleshooting a diverse set of storage devices and environments.

In this update, the ability to manage your storage is expanded to include IBM Storage Ceph storage systems. Storage Ceph is an open, massively scalable, simplified data storage solution for modern data pipelines.

Use Storage Insights to get a view of key capacity and configuration information about your monitored Storage Ceph storage systems, such as IP address, Object Storage Demons (OSDs), total capacity, used capacity, and much more. You can also easily spot which storage systems require your attention.

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Monitoring IBM Storage as a Service
IBM Storage as a Service (STaaS) monitoring is available with DS8000 storage systems. Previously, you were able to monitor STaaS environments for FlashSystem storage systems. Now, you can get the same key insights into the capacity usage, potential shortages, and billing overages of STaaS environments backed by DS8000 storage systems.

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Enhancements to monitoring with Call Home
The ability to monitor IBM Spectrum Virtualize storage systems without a data collector by using Call Home with cloud services was updated with the following enhancements:

• More monitored events to keep you updated: Being aware of the changes on your Spectrum Virtualize storage systems is an important part of monitoring your storage environment. Now, the ability to track and view those changes in real time is expanded to include even more events so that you don’t miss out.
• More information about storage systems that connect through Call Home with cloud services: Use the new ‘Data Collection Type’ value to quickly identify which of your monitored storage systems use Call Home with cloud services and which use data collectors for metadata collection. Use the Data Collection value to track the status of metadata collection for storage systems that use Call Home with cloud services.
• Picking the right log package for a ticket just got easier: You can now select and upload an existing log package for storage systems that connect through Call Home with cloud services. Up to 10 existing log packages are available for you to select, starting with the most recent.

That’s not all
See a full list of all the changes in 1Q23,

How do I get IBM Storage Insights?
If you manage IBM block storage systems, but don’t already have the free version of Storage Insights, sign up .

What you need to know about signing up for Storage Insights:
You’ll need an IBM ID. It will be your administrator account and single point of access to Storage Insights. It’s also used by the company to communicate key updates, announcements, and your unique URL. Ensure that the email address associated with your IBM ID is valid and keep an eye out for important messages from the IT company.

If you don’t have an IBM ID. Getting one is easy. Complete this Create an IBM account.

To purchase full subscription to Storage Insights Pro:
Go to the Storage Insights page on the company’s website.Click Pricing and then Purchase now to learn about and purchase a subscription.