NAS Performance Monitoring
Automate storage capacity planning for better NAS infrastructure monitoring
Automated storage capacity planning is an important features of any Network Attached Storage (NAS) servers monitoring solution, as automation can help eliminate time-consuming manual processes and the human errors often associated with them.
With SolarWinds® Storage Resource Monitor (SRM), you get a NAS systems monitoring solution built to enable automated storage capacity planning and gain insights into your network attached storage performance. This means you’ll not only be able to avoid last-minute capacity surprises, but more easily leverage storage consumption patterns across NAS and SAN devices to help you plan your future storage needs more precisely.
With the NAS monitoring tool in SRM, you can see key storage metrics, such as total storage capacity, provisioned capacity, and over-subscribed capacity from a single dashboard screen, receive predefined reports, and get instant alerts on key network attached storage metrics and capacity constraints.
Visualize storage performance across devices with a NAS monitoring tool
When it comes to NAS infrastructure monitoring, using a NAS tool to gain deeper visibility into your storage performance can allow you to do more than just understand your NAS storage capacity. It can be tough to understand the health storage devices from various vendors without a unified storage and NAS infrastructure monitoring tool.
Using SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor, you get a unified storage monitoring solution built to deliver an at-a-glance view of key NAS storage capacity metrics, including a raw disk summary and usable capacity across devices, right from the dashboard. It also highlights storage facing performance risks. This unified visibility can help simplify a variety of tasks, including understanding how volumes are load balanced across your storage arrays, managing storage consumption on RAID groups, and much more to help simplify and accelerate troubleshooting.
Get quick alerts and detailed reports to simplify and elevate your NAS performance monitoring
SolarWinds SRM makes staying on top of your NAS servers monitoring easier thanks to the NAS tool’s alerting and reporting features. With SRM, you can receive critical alerts on pressing NAS performance monitoring issues. The NAS tool comes with a variety of predefined and customizable alerts to immediately notify you of storage performance issues. These web-based alerts allow you to set warning and critical threshold levels, so you know about any issues detected through the tool’s NAS infrastructure monitoring immediately.
In addition to its thorough alerting, SRM serves as a quality NAS report tool, delivering many out-of-the box reports pertaining specifically to NAS devices. You can also customize the parameters of your reports to get helpful business insights. With the SRM NAS report tool, you can generate various reports including top 10 volumes by latency, storage pool utilization, enterprise capacity summary, free volume report, thin provisioning, details on storage assets, RAID/storage pool group utilization, and more.
Troubleshoot storage issues quickly and effectively with a NAS monitoring tool
SRM offers NAS servers monitoring visibility that can make it easier to navigate across all your layers of storage, including LUNs, storage pools, and arrays, by letting you seamlessly move between layers. Each layer includes a detailed dashboard to deliver insight into performance and health.
SRM is built to help you troubleshoot and make it easier to view storage issues using the All Active Alerts widget. You can check triggering objects to display more information and additional issues with every object. The details page can provide visibility into the object's key metrics and help you get to the bottom of the issue quicker. The NAS systems monitoring solution also features widgets with colored backgrounds to indicate monitored values that have reached warning or critical levels and need your attention.
Track the performance of multiple NAS arrays with a single NAS arrays monitoring solution
Juggling multiple storage monitoring tools every day to get effective NAS arrays monitoring wastes valuable production hours. With SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor, you can get the insights you need with a single tool.
SRM offers a unified dashboard view to show you how various NAS and SAN devices are performing in one place. This does more than just reduce the number of screens you must look at and how much NAS servers monitoring information you must manually compare. SRM allows you to easily identify performance bottlenecks and take corrective actions before they have a serious impact. You can also receive alerts about volumes/LUNs running out of space, or response times slower than what you initially set across different storage devices, so you can more easily stay on top of your NAS arrays monitoring.
Get More on NAS Monitoring
What is NAS storage?
NAS stands for network attached storage. NAS is a dedicated server used for file sharing and storage—but not for other services other servers often cover, like authentication and email. It takes the form of a hard drive attached to a network and used for storage. NAS can be accessed through an assigned network address.
There are three main elements playing an important role when it comes to NAS storage (and NAS monitoring):
- Protocol: NAS servers are fully supported by the common interface file system and the network file system. NAS servers also support a variety of other protocols including FTP, HTTP, and SCP. However, communication is most effective through TCP/IP.
- Connections: You can use Ethernet, fiber optics, or wireless mediums with 802.11 standards to establish connections with your NAS servers.
- Drives: While you can use basically any technology for your NAS disks, SCSI is usually used by default. However, ATA disks, magnetic media, and optical disks are also supported by NAS.
Why is NAS performance monitoring important?
NAS performance monitoring is important because performance issues can have a major negative impact on the productivity of computer and network environments whose work is based on the availability of processed data. Failing to understand your storage hotspots can also negatively impact your data center.
The key to understanding and addressing hotspots and performance problems is through effective NAS systems monitoring. NAS servers monitoring enables:
- Early detection of possible future issues
- Fast detection of existing storage subsystem issues
- Reduced risks for unexpected downtime
- Advanced planning for future capacity needs and system upgrades
The availability of storage space is a critical element impacting the performance and speed of computers and servers. To keep wide area computer networks in good condition, it’s necessary to constantly take care and monitor the availability of data storage space, improve available hardware, and detect potential data loss risks.
Benefits of using a NAS storage performance monitoring tool
Understanding NAS performance can be easier using a NAS monitoring tool to help you keep tabs on the physical health of your critical NAS storage devices. When you use a NAS monitoring tool that goes beyond simply monitoring storage capacity to help you plan and manage capacity, you can also save a huge amount of time (and more than a couple headaches) by both predicting and being aware of your storage needs before a crisis occurs.
Using a NAS performance monitoring solution can also empower you to plan for system upgrades more easily, so you aren’t scrambling because a critical device suddenly failed. NAS monitoring designed to focus on latency can help you stay on top of failing devices or aging drives and manage bandwidth to and from your storage devices, which can prevent slowdowns and performance bottlenecks due to bandwidth management issues.
How does NAS performance monitoring work in SRM?
SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) is a NAS monitoring tool designed to deliver multi-vendor, agentless NAS performance monitoring, capacity monitoring, and forecasting for your organization’s storage devices. The tool automatically monitors multiple NAS arrays at once, delivering insights to help improve performance and prevent downtime and unexpected costs.
Additionally, SRM offers integration with the Orion® Platform. By leveraging SRM insights alongside other SolarWinds products, such as Virtualization Manager to spot storage issues and Server & Application Monitor to identify dependencies between devices, the SolarWinds AppStack™ dashboard available in the Orion Platform can help you understand root causes of storage performance issues faster.
With both out-of-the-box and customizable alerts, you’ll be alerted as soon as any key metrics point to one of these potential issues. Once you get an alert, navigate to the dashboard to begin digging down deeper to access more details and troubleshoot issues. If you want even more information, you can check out the in-depth, customizable storage performance reports in SRM, which can provide details on key storage capacity trends and other performance metrics.
- What is NAS storage?
- Why is NAS performance monitoring important?
- Benefits of using a NAS storage performance monitoring tool
- How does NAS performance monitoring work in SRM?
What is NAS storage?
NAS stands for network attached storage. NAS is a dedicated server used for file sharing and storage—but not for other services other servers often cover, like authentication and email. It takes the form of a hard drive attached to a network and used for storage. NAS can be accessed through an assigned network address.
There are three main elements playing an important role when it comes to NAS storage (and NAS monitoring):
- Protocol: NAS servers are fully supported by the common interface file system and the network file system. NAS servers also support a variety of other protocols including FTP, HTTP, and SCP. However, communication is most effective through TCP/IP.
- Connections: You can use Ethernet, fiber optics, or wireless mediums with 802.11 standards to establish connections with your NAS servers.
- Drives: While you can use basically any technology for your NAS disks, SCSI is usually used by default. However, ATA disks, magnetic media, and optical disks are also supported by NAS.
"Utilizing Storage Resource Monitor has helped the organization improve the way it maintains an efficient, stable, and properly utilized storage infrastructure."
Systems Engineer
State and Local Government
Extensive NAS monitoring for better NAS storage capacity planning
Storage Resource Monitor
Quickly diagnose critical performance problems with a detailed view of monitored storage LUNs and volumes
See unified dashboard views and get automated alerts for key NAS monitoring metrics
Create predefined and custom reports to see performance and capacity trends across your storage environment
Starts at $1,876
SRM, an Orion module, is built on the SolarWinds Platform
