Improve Collaboration and Reporting with a Single View for Multi-Vendor Storage Performance

Eliminate Using Multiple Reporting Tools for Different Storage Vendors

Almost every storage hardware provider provides their own performance, configuration, and/or capacity reporting tool to assist with analysis and management. But rarely do these vendor-specific reporting tools provide visibility into the hardware of other vendors other than standard, non-nuanced views that take into consideration the other hardware’s unique characteristics.

In this video, we’ll cover how utilizing a single pane of glass for multi-vendor storage reporting and analysis improves not only the effectiveness of your reporting, but also the collaboration amongst team members and departments.

Video Transcript

In part one of this two-part series, we discussed how having a single pane of glass can help you assess the performance and configuration of your environment more easily. In this video, we’re going to discuss how having this single source of truth can enhance your reporting and collaboration.

For instance, if you’re doing storage capacity reports and you have multiple storage array vendors, each vendor may have different reporting units. Some may be in megabytes, some may be in tebibyte. Some may mix them up depending on how you’re looking at things.

Each array may also have different capabilities such as de-duplication and compression. And each array may be in different time zones. IntelliMagic Vision automatically normalizes this data so when you’re looking at a chart or a graph you’re comparing apples to apples, and that allows us to be able to show things like if you’re looking at your disk capacity, we can look at Health Insights charts like we saw in the previous video that can show you really quickly, your current storage standpoint.

We also have tables that allow you to look at how your storage capacity is being consumed in different ways. And then we have the configuration trending reports, which show you how your capacity is being consumed over time. And based on the burn rates that we calculate for each storage pool on each storage array, we can show you accurate capacity forecasts for when each storage array is going to run out of data.

So having all of these reports in one place is one thing. Being able to share them with your colleagues and be able to use them in a collaborative manner is quite another thing entirely. IntelliMagic Vision provides numerous ways to get data out of the product and into the hands of the people that need to see them.

The simplest way is by exporting charts. So you can export a chart, either download or email it in PDF, PowerPoint, CSV, or Splunk, which Splunk is a Splunk optimized CSV report. So it’s a simple matter of just exporting them out of IntelliMagic Vision, but we can also arrange to have any report within IntelliMagic Vision emailed to whomever you want in any of those formats at whatever cadence you want. So those reports will always be there in their inbox.

But the most powerful way that you can use IntelliMagic Vision and the most collaborative way is by using our multiple configurable and shareable dashboards. So you can think of a dashboard as a blank piece of paper, where you can put the charts and graphs that are most important to you on it.

For instance, this is a dashboard that I created for this video that shows different storage arrays, your hosts, and your SAN fabric, all in one view. So you can quickly go here and be able to quickly assess the health of your environment.

And adding a report to IntelliMagic Vision’s dashboard is a simple matter. Let’s say if we’re going to put a Health Insights chart for capacity on here. It’s a matter of just telling it to put it on a dashboard. We’re gonna use the single pane dashboard. And now that report is on the dashboard.

You can also, and here’s the report that we were talking about. You can also choose to share a dashboard. So if you go here and edit, if you make this visible to other users, anyone that has a login to IntelliMagic Vision will now be able to see this report or see this dashboard in a read only manner. So that’s a really powerful way to be able to share information with other colleagues.

So that’s just a few ways that having a single pane of glass can help you be more collaborative in your environment. I hope you found this video useful, and I hope that you have a wonderful day.