Storage has become vital for all IT infrastructures with the increasing adoption of technologies like Big Data and virtualization. 

Many enterprises use multiple SAN devices and NAS storage to store essential information. 

And a failure or slowdown of the storage system can cause applications to turn off or fail, directly affecting the business. A simple outage can also lead to data loss, network failure, or slowdowns. 

This requires administrators to proactively detect issues, identify the cause of problems, and initiate corrective actions to keep the infrastructure healthy. 

Thus, it is important to monitor the physical health of SAN and NAS storage devices with advanced storage monitoring tools. 

Let’s dive deeper into storage monitoring tools and how they can help keep your storage systems in optimal state and the enterprise running. 

What Is Storage Monitoring?

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Data storage nowadays is changing rapidly. Most of today’s enterprises depend on software-defined storage in the on-premises or cloud. So, keeping track of your storage requires monitoring to provide deeper visibility across your infrastructure storage. This is done with storage monitoring. 

Storage monitoring is a process of monitoring, evaluating, and managing on-premises, virtual, and cloud-based storage systems. It allows you to view the issues regarding critical applications while monitoring several elements associated with the applications. 

Storage monitoring tools are software offering a wider view of your administrators so that they can take proactive actions to predict, diagnose, and resolve issues in a smarter way. This will improve the end-user experience and device performance. 

Features of an Ideal Storage Monitoring Tool

Storage management solutions offer a wide variety of features. The important features that a storage monitoring tool provides are:

  • Data management
  • Storage provisioning
  • Storage solution visibility
  • Array availability, capacity, and performance
  • Data volumes and status
  • Alerting
  • Storage analysis
  • Advanced graphs
  • Infrastructure management
  • Capacity planning
  • Configuration wizards

Benefits of Storage Monitoring

Storage monitoring tools can help you evaluate the following:

  • The performance and health of device ports, controllers, disk groups, physical disks, LUNs, and more
  • Storage capacity so that the resources can be used for maximum performance
  • The density of traffic on the disk groups
  • External hosts that handle the maximum number of requests
  • Disk array 
  • Slowdowns

Apart from this, storage monitoring enables data-driven insights to make better decisions, detects problems early to increase productivity and efficiency, and prevents downtime and losses with proper maintenance. 

Storage monitoring solutions let users plan and prepare for IT upgrades. Also, remote monitoring helps you save time and reduce disruptions. 

Let’s now discuss some of the reliable storage monitoring tools that help you monitor the performance and health of your infrastructure storage devices. 

Paessler PRTG

Monitor all your storage components with Paessler PRTG to avoid storage failures or problems that negatively impact your business. The monitoring solution includes all the required features for the complete data storage process. 

Paessler PRTG keeps the monitoring process simple while ensuring clarity, ease of use, and performance. It offers a central overview of all the storage components and tools to make your work even simpler.

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Thus, the monitoring solution needs to fulfill some requirements:

  • Monitoring of hardware: The system is required to monitor the physical disk status, temperature, CPU, fan status, and more. It is quite clear and easy to monitor hardware components. 
  • Monitoring of storage systems: A monitoring system must support common storage vendors, such as NetApp, Lenovo, and Dell EMC. This also includes the creation of custom integrations flexibly for other systems easily and quickly. 
  • Monitoring of cloud storage: Cloud storage is vital for today’s business. The monitoring solution gives a clear insight into the common cloud storage providers. 
  • Monitoring of IT infrastructure and performance: IT components like firewalls, servers, virtual hosts, databases, switches, and more play a crucial role in the complete data storage process. A better monitoring solution includes various features for a general view of the entire IT. 

Paessler PRTG includes several predefined sensors for monitoring common storage systems like Synology, Buffalo TeraStation, HP, QNAP, and more. In addition, you will get sensors for monitoring logical and physical disks for similar systems.  

For services like Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Amazon CloudWatch, or Google Drive, PRTG has numerous sensors. Furthermore, it includes different sensors for every software and hardware component in IT environments. 

In every license, you will get monitoring of traffic, server, database, virtual monitor, hardware, and actual storage applications or devices without any modules and add-ons. 

ManageEngine OpManager

A dedicated storage solution needs a dedicated storage management application. ManageEngine OpManager’s storage monitoring solution provides you with the flexibility of managing all the network storage devices from a single window. 

Features and benefits:

  • OpManager offers advanced performance monitoring solutions along with extensive reporting. 
  • It packs numerous features, such as capacity utilization monitors, disk read/write statistics, and storage growth graphs, so you can efficiently monitor and manage your storage devices.
  • You will be able to monitor SAN components, including storage arrays, Tape Libraries, Fiber channel switches, etc., that form the backbone of entire enterprise applications.
  • OpManager lets you view the entire storage environment from a single place. 
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  • It reduces downtime by detecting storage problems within time. 
  • You can save time with effective alarm escalations and in-depth reporting. 
  • By using OpManager, you will save on the cost of ownership.
  • At an affordable price, you will be able to monitor your storage easily. 
  • OpManager’s storage monitor allows you to monitor in-depth network storage.
  • In addition, it enables you to configure depending on the seriousness of the fault condition. Each alarm and event is assigned as per the severity. 
  • It utilizes vendor-specific, CLI, SNMP, or SMI-S to discover and also monitor the RAIDS in the network. 
  • Furthermore, it automatically discovers the Tape libraries in NAS or SAS networking vendor-specific APIs or MIBs. You can monitor the door status, cleaning status, and operational status. 
  • You will get an advanced storage capacity and forecasting planning that helps you in predicting the storage requirements for the organization. 

SolarWinds

SolarWinds’s storage resource monitor offers management of storage resources for the health, capacity, and performance of multi-vendor storage. 

Features and benefits:

  • Storage resource monitor offers a data storage management application that streamlines access to vital data. 
  • You will get a detailed view of Dell EMC storage and can control the entire storage environment. 
  • It ensures peak performance for all the Dell storage arrays.
  • You will be able to monitor the health of the EMC Unity All-Flash storage.
  • You can leverage enterprise management tools for efficient infrastructure monitoring. 
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  • It can proactively monitor the Hitachi storage array performance to maintain a powerful storage infrastructure. 
  • Easily troubleshoot Huawei storage issues easily and make capacity planning decisions efficiently. 
  • Gain control over the IBM storage arrays with ease and run data center operations smoothly.
  • You can run mission-critical software with the control of the INFINIDAT storage. 
  • Monitor the performance and health of the NAS arrays closely. 
  • Easily enhance NetApp storage capacity by monitoring NetApp storage devices. 
  • Get the health of the storage devices with network storage monitoring devices.

You can easily get an in-depth view of your storage and monitor the performance of the Nimble arrays. With a single-view monitoring process, storage and capacity monitoring will become easier. You can also track storage consumption efficiently to make a precise plan for storage capacity. 

The storage resource monitor starts at $1,876. You can also take a fully functional free trial for 30 days. 

Nagios

Get the complete monitoring solution for your storage systems with Nagios. The storage monitoring solution includes disk usage, file presence, SMART status, file count, directory size, file size, RAID array status, and more. 

Implementing effective monitoring with Nagios gives you many benefits, such as:

  • Advanced planning for your system upgrades
  • Early detection of future failures
  • Detection of broken batch jobs
  • Fast detection of subsystem storage problems
  • Reduction of unexpected downtime risk
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Nagios offers two different solutions that provide storage monitoring benefits and capabilities:

  • Nagios XI
  • Nagios Core

Nagios XI software offers a powerful solution to your problems. It is a highly trusted monitoring tool for your business storage needs. 

Features and benefits:

  • Nagios XI uses a robust Nagios Core monitoring engine to offer scalable and efficient monitoring.
  • You will get a new web interface that is highly customizable.
  • Administrators can view network incidents to resolve them before the time to avoid catastrophes.
  • You will get configuration wizards, infrastructure management options, configuration snapshots, capacity planning, advanced user management, and more.
  • Get the highest degree of server performance, a central view of all the IT operations and business processes, capacity planning graphs, and more. 

Nagios offers flexible plans starting at $1,995, including GUI configuration, advanced reporting, custom actions, dashboard deployment, notification escalations, and more. 

IntelliMagic

Monitor the storage performance of your SAN infrastructure in a single window with the IntelliMagic performance management application. It will help reduce your time and costs in resolving storage problems. 

You will get maximum value from the SAN infrastructure using built-in architecture-specific intelligence for performance and capacity optimization. You can also use the statistical detection process to identify and fix issues before any impact on the production systems.

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Get automated health insights, such as multiple components, AI-rated performance indicators, multiple metrics, and more, to receive hardware-specific knowledge. The health insights provide preventive information for port response time issues, front-end response time problems, throughput constraints, and other performance risks. 

IntelliMagic offers an advanced statistical analysis that provides capacity and performance anomaly detection. This allows you to see what changes have occurred and determine the significance and magnitude of those changes. 

Furthermore, IntelliMagic Vision’s Change Detection functionality identifies essential workload changes in the virtual machine, switch port environment, host, storage, and more. This helps in investigating anomalies before they impact the environment. 

Request a free trial or download the brochure to monitor your system storage performance. 

Power Admin Storage Monitor

Get powerful data and disk monitoring solutions with Power Admin Storage Monitor. Report easily on file types, owners, ages, duplicates, etc. It allows you to monitor a directory and user sizes, predict when the disk is out of space, scan data in terabytes, and more. 

You can reduce the costs by getting files that aren’t in use and alert on low disk space and changed files. Power Admin lets you monitor the whole process from a central view and gives reports on multiple servers. 

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The File System Analyzer easily answers what is stored. Let’s say you want to know the files that haven’t been accessed in five years, the largest storage users, the largest files, etc.; File System Analyzer can help you with this. 

Get advanced features like HTTP-based reports, schedule reports, Ad hoc reports, user quota monitoring and alerts, and flexible and powerful actions on the alert criteria. Power Admin Storage Monitor runs as a service; hence, there is no need to start a program or log in manually while monitoring your system. 

You can download the fully functional 30-day free trial and see the program can be configured in a minute or two. 

LogicMonitor

Discover minute details of your enterprise storage systems automatically with LogicMonitor. You can view storage monitoring, graphing performance and health, alerting, and more from a unified window. 

Get the performance details of traditional on-premises, cloud-based, and hyper-converged storage systems. Cloud-based storage systems like Azure, AWS, and GCP can be easily monitored to optimize performance rapidly across the entire infrastructure. LogicMonitor supports virtualized storage systems, such as Nutanix, VMware vSAN, and Cisco HyperFlex. 

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You can monitor your traditional storage systems like Cisco, HPE, Pure Storage, Dell Technologies, and NetApp to know what storage systems are capable of. Also, combining past trends with your best practices allows you to monitor key metrics, such as disk space, latency, IOPS, etc., to prevent problems. 

Avoid capacity-related issues with amazing forecasting. LogicMonitor gives estimates of your storage that examine growth trends to pinpoint the need for extra resources. Thus, you can buy smart and stay within your budget limit.

eG Innovations

eG Innovations allows you to monitor 20 storage devices from a single console. You can monitor every aspect of storage performance, such as hardware, LUNs, HBAs, controllers, physical disks, etc. Its proactive alert functionality can also resolve your storage issues quickly and efficiently. 

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Get deeper visibility into your storage sub-system elements, including host ports, caches, enclosures, hosts, fiber channel switches, and more. eG Innovations covers IBM DS RAID, HP 3PAR, Clariion and EMC VNX, Dell EqualLogic, Hitachi USP and AMS, HP EVA, and other SMI-S-compliant storage devices. 

You will get a simplified solution to your issues with eG Innovation. It correlates the storage performance with other infrastructure tiers to ensure easier ongoing business processes. In addition, it offers baselines, historical trends, and reports to help you get the right size of current infrastructure storage and plan for further growth. 

See the demo or start a free trial and experience the positivity of using it. 

Final Words

Modern organizations now need a reliable storage monitoring tool to eliminate failures and disasters in storage systems. Storage monitoring software plays an essential role in monitoring activities, applications, servers, and the performance of your storage infrastructure.

Thus, if you have an infrastructure with many devices connected, you must choose the best storage monitoring tool from the above list. It will help you efficiently monitor the entire infrastructure storage devices and prevent damage. 

Next, check out the network bandwidth monitoring tools.