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Analyzing the performance impact from moved volumes

A storage administrator receives several incident alerts during peak work hours of each day of the work week. Employees have also been complaining about poor performance when accessing email. The administrator uses the Volume Details page to analyze the activity of the volume that hosts the Exchange email server.

Before you begin

About this task

Performance Manager identifies when a volume moves between aggregates. It can detect when the volume move is occurring, completed, or failed. The Volume Details page displays a change event icon for each state of the volume move, which helps you track when a move operation occurred and helps you determine whether it may have contributed to an incident.

If you are viewing the Incident Details page, you can click the name link for a volume to go directly to the Volume Details page for a specific volume.

Steps

  1. In the Search bar, type the name of the volume.
    The name of the volume is displayed in the search results.
    Note: The Search bar requires at least three characters before the results can display the names of objects that contain those characters.
  2. Click the name link of the volume.
    The volume is displayed on the Volume Details page.
  3. On the Historic data chart, adjust the sliders to show activity from the previous work week.
  4. Analyze the Response Time chart and the Operations chart to see how the volume performed over the last few days.
    The administrator notices a consistent pattern of very high average response time of over 42 milliseconds per operation (ms/op), with incidents, each day of the week and decides to move the volume to a less busy aggregate to improve performance. Using OnCommand System Manager, the administrator moves the volume to an aggregate with Flash Pool enabled for an increased performance boost. Approximately an hour later, they return to Performance Manager to confirm that the move operation completed successfully and that the response time has improved.
  5. Search for the volume to display the Volume Details page.
  6. On the Historic data chart, click 1d to view the activity from the last 1 day, a few hours since the volume move completed.
    At the bottom of the page, in the Events time line, a change event icon (Change event icon) is displayed at the time when the volume move operation completed. A black, vertical line is also displayed from the change event icon to the Response Time chart.
  7. Point your cursor to the change event icon to view details about the event in the Events List.
    Because the volume moved to an aggregate with Flash Pool enabled, the administrator wants to see the change in read and write I/O to cache.
  8. On the Break down data by menu, under Throughput, select Cache hit ratio.
    The Cache hit ratio chart displays statistics about the reads and writes to cache.

    The volume successfully moved to a less busy aggregate and the change event is highlighted in the Events List on the right. The average response time decreased significantly from over 42 ms/op to around 24 ms/op. The current response time is around 1.5 ms/op. In the Cache hit ratio chart, the amount of successful read and write hits to cache is now at 100%, because the volume is now on an aggregate with Flash Pool enabled.