topic Re: PAM monitoring? in Active IQ Unified Manager Discussions

PAM monitoring?

emanuel — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:14:35 GMT

Do any of the versions of OM support monitoring PAM hisotrical information?

I am running 3.8 ... its solid and stable here but having the ability to store historical PAM information would be wizard.

Re: PAM monitoring?

adaikkap — Wed, 12 May 2010 17:57:39 GMT

PAM information is not monitored by dfm.

Regards

adai

Re: PAM monitoring?

RichardSopp — Wed, 12 May 2010 18:02:09 GMT

Is it available in Performance Advisor at all?

Re: PAM monitoring?

emanuel — Wed, 12 May 2010 18:02:57 GMT

I just heard Darth Vader scream .... "Noooooooooooooo!"

okay i need to find a method to store / capture PAM info for long term.

Re: PAM monitoring?

steve_francis — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:28:33 GMT

Logicmonitor detects any PAM cards installed, and monitors them for latency, hit/miss rate, etc.

The NetApp monitoring is, I think, very good.

But I'm biased.

Re: PAM monitoring?

pascalduk — Fri, 14 May 2010 08:03:16 GMT

With the stats command you can access the PAM statistics. It is all in the counter ext_cache_obj.

You can see the explanation of the counters with "stats explain counters ext_cache_obj".

Re: PAM monitoring?

RichardSopp — Fri, 14 May 2010 13:19:36 GMT

Thanks Pascal for showing us the counter group to look for.

I'm running DFM 3.8.1 in the lab and if you run the NMC and look at creating a custom view in performance advisor you can see that the ext_cache_obj counter group exists along with all its sub counters.

So doesn't this mean performance advisor shoul dbe able to capture and report on historical information for PAM once a custom view is created?

Re: PAM monitoring?

amiller_1 — Sat, 22 May 2010 02:46:56 GMT

Has anyone else tried this? I may try it myself but curious to hear other experiences...

Re: PAM monitoring?

pascalduk — Tue, 25 May 2010 06:43:52 GMT

Found out that NetApp give us a stats preset xml file in ontap 7.3.2+: /etc/stats/preset/flexscale-access.xml

stats show -p flexscale-access

Advantage is that you get nicer output of the most important pam statistics. There is also a preset file for the predictive caching: flexscale-pcs

I am also on DFM 3.8.1 and have not used it yet to collect PAM statistics. At the moment I am dumping 5 minute average PAM statistics to a file. Does anyone know PAM statistics are present by default in DFM 4.0?

Re: PAM monitoring?

sureshru — Tue, 25 May 2010 07:08:29 GMT

PAM is not monitored by DFM (Adai's response above).

-sureshr

Re: PAM monitoring?

RichardSopp — Thu, 27 May 2010 18:21:57 GMT

Here is a screen shot from Performance Advisor (using OM 3.8.1) running in my lab with a custom view created from some of the counters listed in Pascal's earlier post.

Now not all the counters for the object will report and I was going to raise a case to troubleshoot this at some point but it's not critical or required in production right now.

So it looks like some of the ext_cache_obj counters are available in Performance Advisor.

My hope is NetApp can give us a consistent single bashboard for all this reporting and trending information. Having to consolidate Perf Stat, ONTAP, and Perf Advisor data into single report is not a sustainable approach long term.

Re: PAM monitoring?

adaikkap — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 01:41:08 GMT

The counters are ext_cache_obj.There are some counter which are basic and others diag.

I didn’t enable any diag and I could see the counters below for ext_cache_obj.

# dfm perf counter list filer:ext_cache_obj:*:* | grep basic | grep hit
ext_cache_obj ec0 hit_normal_lev0 per_sec basic
ext_cache_obj ec0 hit_metadata_file per_sec basic
ext_cache_obj ec0 hit_directory per_sec basic
ext_cache_obj ec0 hit_indirect per_sec basic
ext_cache_obj ec0 total_metadata_hits per_sec basic
ext_cache_obj ec0 hit_percent percent basic
ext_cache_obj ec0 hit per_sec basic

There is no default view for the same; you will have to create a custom view for the same to be collected for PAM II.

You can also set thresholds on the same, and the same will be generated on the filer and not on the object ec0 unlike volume or aggr,but like the processors.

As they are not managed objects in DFM.

Regards

adai

Re: PAM monitoring?

sssnake2332 — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:32:51 GMT

I'm trying to set up OM 4.0 (or as IBM calls it N series Management Console 3.0.0.4113, aka DFM 4.0.0.6953) to show some flash-cache (or FCM as I call it, previously called PAM-II) stats. I have added a custom view and created some custom charts for the view, but so far, none of the charts are gathering any data. I read in this thread about not all the counters actually doing anything.

So, I am hoping someone out there knows which counters work and which ones don't. I might end up providing that information if I find any that work (so far i'm 0 for 3). I'm attaching a screenshot of the available counters. If I narrow it down, I will post again with which counters that work.

Thanks!

Re: PAM monitoring?

sssnake2332 — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 22:10:01 GMT

Now that I have some time and am back to looking at this, I realize when it prompts "Object Selection - You can select the object for which you want to display the chart", it doesn't display my controllers there. I have been selecting the folder that contains my controllers. That must be why my counters aren't working. The other method I was trying, I would see ec0, like in the above screenshot, but under ec0, I have nothing listed. So, now the real question is: Why the heck don't my 2 controllers that have FCM's installed show up? I think I'll restart DFM server to see if it will realize I have FCM's now or something. I need to learn OM more.

Any help with FCM & OM would be greatly appreciated. This thread has been helpful.

Edit: Also, I have gone to the data collection setup and enabled ext.cache.obj for my 2 controllers, still can't select the controllers for any custom chart setup though.

Edit again: OK, I got it working with a counter I haven't tried yet (just named: hit). I deleted all the custom view & chart stuff that I was messing with and started over. I set up the view to apply to all "Group" objects since it doesn't let me choose the counters when I choose "Storage System". Then added a chart named FCM test, chose the ext_cache_obj.hit counter, and applied it. It worked this time. I went to delete it and create some with better names. Tried to create one just named "hit", set up exactly like the working "test" one. Now I get an error when I click on apply. It says "Invalid input object-name-or-id. Generic API error." Hmm...

Edit some more: I get the aforementioned API error whenever I try to edit/delete a custom chart from a custom view. Oh well, I just have to create it all in one step. I'll try to post an updated pic of which counters worked for me.

Re: PAM monitoring?

sssnake2332 — Mon, 02 May 2011 03:40:14 GMT

Anyone know how to collect data on a counter that doesn't count as a "Storage System" counter? I would love to have historical FCM stats in OM, but it's a "group" counter and data collection setup only shows "storage systems".

Re: PAM monitoring?

arndt — Mon, 02 May 2011 11:03:37 GMT

Here is how I setup PAM/PCS stats with Opr Mgr 4.0. I don't have a 3.8 instance to try this with, but hopefully this helps point you in the right direction for Ops Mgr 3.8 as well.

1. Use the PA GUI and go to Setup -> Hosts -> Edit.

2. Enable the ext_obj_cache counters that you want. The counters that I think are interesting are hit, miss, hit_percent, usage, and maybe disk_reads_replaced.

3. Use the PA GUI to create a custom view with these counters. In order to get these counters in a custom view, your custom view must apply to "Particular objects" on the screen where you enter the View name. Then on the counter selection screen choose a category of "ext_cache_obj", select the storage system for which you enabled the ext_cache_obj counters, and add the counters to the view.

As you will see, this means you need to create a custom view for every system on which you want to see FlashCache stats, which is a bit of a pain...but I verified with engineering that this is the only option as of this version of Ops Mgr.

Hope that helps,

Mike

Re: PAM monitoring?

sssnake2332 — Mon, 02 May 2011 14:43:30 GMT

Thanks for the reply. I finally got the counters to show up under the ec0 branch of the ext_cache_obj category. Part of my problem was that I was choosing the wrong chart type. Needed to be choosing the "over time" option, but I had given up on it after the counters wouldn't show up under ec0. I don't know if it took time or what, but I enabled the ext_cache_obj counters for my controllers, restarted dfm services, checked under ec0 and had nothing show up. Eventually, the counters did show up and it's way easier and better than what I was trying to do over the weekend. I might try to figure out which counter is equivalent to which stat in the "stats show –p flexscale-access" output.

Thanks again!

~Mike~

Re: PAM monitoring?

sssnake2332 — Mon, 02 May 2011 16:30:58 GMT

Well it's pretty obvious which counter is used for each stat in the "stats show –p flexscale-access" command. The only discrepancy is that "hit percent" doesn't work in OpsMgr, but you can get a rough idea of the hit percentage by comparing hits to misses. I set up 9 charts that fit nicely in the 9-up view. See attachment.

Re: PAM monitoring?

RichardSopp — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:38:54 GMT

There are subtle differences in the performance monitoring setup workflow between OM 3.8 and 4.0.

Two days of thrashing it out in a lab revealed that the main difference is the setup / hosts / data collection step with 4.0 that is required if you want to capture counters for historical review that are more 'exotic' than the core cifs, aggr, disk, vol, etc performance counters.

Without the data collection enabled accordingly you can create as many custom views as you like but you can only see the data when you enable the real-time view.

Re: PAM monitoring?

adaikkap — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 19:37:33 GMT

Hi Richard,

You are perfectly correct.

Regards

adai