How to Monitor Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Using NetApp Harvest

Your storage environment may not always be the most transparent part of your deployment. How is its performance, and what kind of capacity are you using? You can add monitoring tools to keep track, but if you’re an ONTAP-based system user, there’s an easier way to do that with NetApp Harvest.

NetApp Harvest is an open-source tool that you can use to get more insight into ONTAP-based and StorageGRID environments. It collects data from your system, such as capacity and performance metrics, then translates that into information that’s routed to a time-series database of your choice.

In this blog post, you’ll find all the steps needed to deploy a basic instance of NetApp Harvest, which you can use to monitor your Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP deployment.

Use these links to jump down to the relevant sections:

• Introduction
• Before you get started
• Installation procedure
  1. General update and applications
  2. Logging into Grafana and API token creation
  3. Import Dashboards in Grafana
  4. Edit the Prometheus config file
  5. Edit the Harvest config file
  6. (Optional) Add more counters to be polled
  7. Start the services
• Reviewing the dashboards
• Simplifying and Streamlining Operations with NetApp Cloud Insights

Introduction

This guide will give you the steps needed to deploy a basic instance of NetApp Harvest, with the end goal of being able to monitor FSx for ONTAP.

Because we’re showing how to set up Harvest for FSx for ONTAP, the example here shows the steps using Amazon EC2 running Amazon Linux 2. There already is a guide that shows how to set this up, but this version aims to be a bit more thorough.

Before you get started

There are a few prerequisites you should have in place before you set up Harvest:

• An Amazon EC2 instance with 4CPU and 16GB RAM, like t2.xlarge, running Amazon Linux 2, with 8GB EBS. This instance should be placed in the same subnet of FSx for ONTAP.
• Assign a Public IP to this EC2 instance at creation. This step is required only if you want to access your monitoring platform from the internet.
• Any system running ONTAP, whether it’s on premises or in the cloud. In this example, we’re setting up Harvest to work with FSx for ONTAP.

To be able to access Grafana via the internet, you’ll need to create a rule in the Security Group to open port 3000.

Installation procedure

There are three components that need to be installed and configured:

• NetApp Harvest, the tool that collects performance data.
• Prometheus DB, where the performance data will be stored.
• Grafana, the tool used to present dashboards.

Harvest collects the data (either via Zapi or Rest API) and then feeds it to Prometheus via HTTP. Grafana needs to be configured to have a data source in Prometheus to show the data in its dashboards.

Note: To edit files in Linux I use “vim”, but you can use whatever tool you prefer.

One other important message about this guide: the steps below must be followed in the order they are presented. Jump ahead at your own risk!

Reviewing the dashboards

Finally, we can look at the performance data in the Grafana dashboards. With Amazon FSx for ONTAP there are only a few of these dashboards that can present the data.

To find them, look for the purple “fsx” tags to the right of each list item. Navigate to “Dashboards”. You should see something like this:

You can click on a dashboard, and it will open in the same tab. Once opened, you will see an empty star icon at the top. Click on that star icon to add that dashboard to the “starred” list so it will be easier to open later.

For instance, I starred the dashboards for “ONTAP:SVM” and “ONTAP:Volume”, which makes it easy for me to see these important dashboards all in one place.

And that’s it! You now have an easier way to monitor your FSx for ONTAP volumes through NetApp Harvest. Have fun!

Simplifying and Streamlining Operations with NetApp Cloud Insights

Complementing NetApp Harvest capabilities, NetApp offers a turnkey service, NetApp Cloud Insights, for gaining a comprehensive view of your Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP service. Cloud Insights centralizes performance monitoring and troubleshooting, reducing complexity and enhancing operational efficiency.

Cloud Insights automates routine tasks such as performance tracking using anomaly detection with its advanced analytics abilities, freeing teams to focus on strategic initiatives. Its out-of-the-box dashboards can be tailored to answer specific needs, such as troubleshooting FSx for ONTAP, migration and capacity planning, offering a clearer understanding of FSx for ONTAP operational status.

To learn more and start your FREE service, visit the Cloud Insight Activation page.