NetApp Engineer

I have met a lot of people that have a fear of Operations Manager. I’ve had a fair play with this now, and once you get to grips with the interface and the thinking behind it all, it is actually quite straight forward. I did a quick guide for one of my customers who wanted to be able to schedule reports and also make some custom ones. This was based on 3.7, so I’m not sure how much this has changed recently, but I will try to update through later versions.

Management Group

Chargeback

Generate Pre-Built Report

Volume Growth

User usage

Build a Custom Report

Scheduled Reports

Management Group

Creating custom reports from within Ops Mgr is relatively simple. The first step is to create some Management Groups so that we can run reports on certain areas of storage rather than across the entire system.

Next to Groups, click “Edit Groups”

Now give the new group a name. If some groups already exist, you can place the new group inside another if needed. Here we are going to add a new group at the global level. Then click “Add”.

The new group appears at the bottom, but you’ll notice the “Group Membership” reads “Empty”. Click on “Empty” so we can add some filesystem members to this group.

From the drop down on the next page, choose the volumes (or other areas if you wish) that you want to add to this reporting group (use shift or ctrl to select multiples) and use the “>>” button to add them. The page will refresh each time you click this, so it’s easier to select and add multiples. Here we have added all the VMware volumes.

There is no commit button or save button. When you click “>>” these are then added to the group. Over the left hand side we can see this new group, and any related warnings are passed down to it.

Chargeback

When you have management groups setup, you can then setup charging mechanisms per group. This is incredibly useful to help work out the TCO of a NetApp system and also obviously how to charge departments back for their usage (or even just show them how much their usage is costing).

How to calculate your cost per GB should be is outside of the scope of this doc, but should take into account several aspects of the filer management, user admin costs and also the basic costs of storage. To get a full costing all aspects need to be reviewed and adjusted for (power, cooling, space, admin costs, management, and so on). For this example we are simply using 5 per GB (although 50 may be closer to reality on a large system). 5 can be $, £, or whatever you want. Because the £ symbol is not a standard ASCII symbol, we have to enter the HTML character code for it. This is “£”. The currency can be set in “Setup”, “Options”, “Chargeback”. You can also set the defaults here.

Got back into “Edit Groups”

And choose the group we have just setup (here we setup a new group for the User Home Directories).

At the bottom of the page we have an “Annual Charge Rate (per GB)” and you’ll see the default we’ve now set. You can alter this for different areas, so VMware may have a different cost to users home directories. Or FC disk may have a different cost to SATA disk.

Chargeback works on averages, so if this is a fresh system or you have just initialised the quota’s, then this may not give any useful information just yet.

Generate Pre-Built Report

Volume Growth

Now we can create some reports based on this. Click on “Reports” and “All” and we can generate a pre-built report based on our new management group.

We want to create a growth report here, so on the left hand side, under “Logical Objects” choose “Volumes”.

Then choose “Volume Growth”

At the bottom under “Using Resource”, click “Browse”.

Then under “Resources” and “Groups” drill down to our newly created group. Just select the top level group and not the individual members. OK this.

The selection a the bottom changes and click on “Show” and we’ll get our volume growth for this management group.

The below example had only recently been setup, the growth rates have not had chance to be registered.

User usage

For this to work successfully, you need to have some quota’s setup on the users home directories. These don’t have to be hard quota’s, in this example we will be setting up some soft quota’s on the filer, and then reporting against this.

From FilerView, goto “Volumes”, “Quotas”, “Add”.

Here we have a single home directory volume and we are going to add a default User quota based on this.

In this particular volume we have a qtree setup for “normal” users. In this example this is actually just one qtree for all users, but this can be setup to report on multiple qtrees if needed.

For this example here we don’t actually want to use quota’s, we simply want to report against our users. So we are going to use a soft quota of 5 GB. I have also put a soft quota on 50,000 (50k) files. All other entries are left blank to prevent any hard limits or other limits being enforced.

Remember to enable this quota we need to go back to the manage page, check it, and click “on” at the bottom. If it has already been enabled, click “resize” to reload the quota details.

The filer will now scan the volume, if it is large it may take some time…

Once this has complete, verify that it is working as expected by looking at “Quotas” and “Report”. We can see the soft limits working in place for our example here.

I also have setup a “Tree” quota, again with soft limits, on a departmental share with separate Qtrees for each department. We can see the results of that quota below.

Back in Operations Manager. By default the monitoring period for Qtree’s and Quota’s is 8 hours and 1 day respectively. If we are demo’ing this, or setting this up for a customer, we may want to reduce this to allow us to show the immediate effects.

Goto “Setup”, “Discovery”.

Then goto “Monitoring”

And update the Qtree Monitoring and User Quota Monitoring intervals. Here I have changed them to 5 minutes and had a quick coffee break.

We will need a new management group this, so I have created a new group called “User Areas” and I added in the Qtree “/home/normal” into the list of members.

We can check that this has successfully picked up our new quotas and is recognising the users by looking at the “Group Status” and then “Quotas” tab.

We now see a list of all the users and the status of their level. Users with green status will be under quota, those with yellow will be over quota.

Now we can finally report on this usage! Under “Reports”, “All”, then under “Monitoring” choose “User Quotas”.

Choose “User Quotas, All” and make sure you are “Using Resource” for the management group we just setup.

This report is almost identical to the one shown within FilerView, but it is a little easier to understand and is sortable.

Users that no longer exist on the domain will appear with their SID rather than their username.

The limitation here is that Quota’s are entirely driven by ownership. So if a user does not own their home directory, then the above process will not work, you will find that “Administrator” owns a large proportion of user files. This should be addressed as it is best practice to make sure all users own their own files anyway.

Build a Custom Report

If we want to build a custom report, maybe comparing 2 data fields that don’t normally exist on the same report, we can do so. Under “Reports” click “Custom”.

You’ll be taken through to the “Create a Report” page by default. There is a veritable banquet of options for custom reports, so have a careful think before simply diving in to create or show this feature off. It may be best to base what you require on an existing report. Most things are available in the pre-built reports, so it may be that you just want to customise this slightly.

For this example, I want a single report to display the username, disk space used, files used, chargeback, daily growth rate % and days to full.

Whatever report you create must have at least one field taken from the “Base Catalog”, so choose the “Base Catalog” that best suits what you are trying to report on. For this example it is obviously going to be “UserQuota”.

The display tab is quite important as this shows where in Operations Manager this report will be visible from a drop down menu. When you are different pages, Operations Manager gives you different lists that you can choose from. Again, on this occasion it makes sense to include this report in the “Quotas” tab.

Next we need to start defining what information we want to include in this report. So from what I defined at the start, I will start filling out my report. Remember you need at least 1 field from the top level.

Then I need to order this in the way I defined for my report.

And finally click “Create” and we see our new Custom report at the bottom.

To see this report in action, go back “Home”, then click on “User Home Directories” (my custom group), “Quotas” and chose this from the drop down “Report” at the top right.

As mentioned earlier, there are some blanks in this as the report hasn’t been collecting data for long, so there is no data for the growth rate or the chargeback amounts.

If you want to tweak this report, you can go back into “Reports”, “Custom” and select “Edit” from the list at the bottom of the page.

Scheduled Reports

Once you know which reports are useful, or perhaps pulled certain aspects out of different reports to create your own custom one, then you may want to schedule these reports and get them emailed to you. Goto “Reports” and “Schedule”

First we want to create a schedule, so click on the “Schedule” tab and click “Add New Schedule”

Create a schedule based on what your requirements are. Here I want a report generated every Sunday at 8pm.

Now back to “Report Schedules” and we can “Add New Report Schedule”.

From here I can now create my Scheduled Report and the email recipients. I am going to get my new custom report (User Custom Usage) to run against my new management group (User Home Directories) to get generated per my new schedule (Weekly Sunday Evening) and emailed to myself. I’m going to keep the standard HTML formatting and all the other standard settings.

Make sure that a valid mail server has been configured before generating any reports. Goto “Setup”, “Options”, “Events and Alerts”. Here I have also updated the purge interval as I don’t want alerts older than 1 week.

To test this schedule, I want to run it now. Check the checkbox of my new schedule and click “Run Selected”.

The report will be attached in a zip file.

Operations Manager Reporting, 7.4 out of 10 based on 7 ratings