Managing Dell Isilon network attached storage – Splunk Lantern

Scenario: As a storage engineer you need to monitor your Dell Isilon storage clusters to keep track of capacity utilization and make sure users have access to what they need. Since you have several Isilon clusters, you want to consolidate all the Isilon activity logs into one place for capacity planning and troubleshooting. You want to use Splunk for that purpose.

How Splunk software can help

You can use Splunk software to understand key metrics related to your Dell Isilon NAS, including CPU utilization and cluster throughput. You can also watch for anomalies, such as user access failures and other events of interest shown in audit logs.

What you need

To succeed in implementing this use case, you need the following dependencies, resources, and information.

People

The best person to implement this use case is a network storage engineer. This person might come from your team, a Splunk partner, or Splunk OnDemand Services.

Time

Managing Dell Isilon network attached storage using Splunk software can take less than one hour to set up.

Technologies

The following technologies, data, and integrations are useful in successfully implementing this use case:

Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud
Dell EMC Isilon Add-on for Splunk Enterprise
Dell EMC Isilon App for Splunk Enterprise
Splunk Heavy Forwarder
Isilon NAS Cluster
Data sources on boarded
- Storage device data

In addition, if you use syslog to send the Isilon data, Splunk's recommendation is to use a syslog server. You may have syslog infrastructure already in place.

How to use Splunk software for this use case

You can run many searches with Splunk software to manage Dell Isilon network attached storage. Depending on what information you have available, you might find it useful to identify some or all of the following:

Other steps you can take

To maximize their benefit, the how-to articles linked in the previous section likely need to tie into existing processes at your organization or become new standard processes. These processes commonly impact success with this use case:

Storage monitoring in the NOC
Capacity planning
Compliance and audit reporting for security

Related resources

This use case is also included in the IT Essentials Learn app, which provides more information about how to implement the use case successfully in your IT maturity journey. In addition, these Splunk resources might help you understand and implement this use case:

Conf talk: Splunk for IT ops: A storage perspective
Conf talk: Master the dark arts: Demystifying Splunk architecture
Blog: Thoughts on Splunking storage data

How to assess your results

Measuring impact and benefit is critical to assessing the value of IT operations. The following are example metrics that can be useful to monitor when implementing this use case:

Throughput for file system and network
Event rate by event type, such as read, write, getAttr, rename, and setAttr
Number of locked and blocked nodes
Cache hit and miss rates
Number of operations over time
Number of client connections
Latency