Monitoring metrics for File Storage for VPC

Platform metrics overview

You can view platform metrics when you enable IBM Cloud Monitoring on your IBM Cloud platform. A monitoring instance must be configured in a region to monitor these metrics. For more information, see Enabling platform metrics.

Before you enable IBM Cloud Monitoring on your platform, keep in mind:

• You can configure only one instance of the IBM Cloud Monitoring service per region to collect platform metrics.
• Platform metrics are regional. Metrics are monitored only from IBM Cloud Monitoring services, which are in the same region of the instance that you want to monitor.
• Metrics are collected automatically and are available for monitoring through the IBM Cloud Monitoring-enabled instance.

Enabling platform metrics

To receive monitoring metrics, you must set up your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance.

1. In the IBM Cloud console, go to the Navigation menu > Observability.

2. Click Monitoring.

3. Click Create.

4. Select a region for your monitoring instance.

   The region needs to match the location of your file share.

5. Choose your pricing plan. Pricing plan details are explained in the selection window. Select the plan that best meets your requirements.

6. Provide a unique service name for your instance. The name can be any name that you want. The name has no impact on functionality.

   Do not give multiple monitoring instances the same name.

7. Optionally, select a resource group. A resource group organizes account resources in customizable groupings. Any account resource that is managed by using IBM Cloud® Identity and Access Management (IAM) access control belongs to a resource group within your account.

   • If you do not have any pre-configured resource groups, or have no reason to share this resource selectively, use the default selection.
   • If your account has multiple resource groups, you can choose which group has access to this IBM Cloud Monitoring instance. By using this selective access, metrics can be available to some resource groups and not to others.

8. Check the Enable Platform Metrics checkbox. You must select this option to receive metrics from your VPN gateway.

9. Click Create. You are taken back to the monitoring metrics home page.

Within a few minutes, your new monitoring instance is displayed with several configurations. You might have to refresh your browser to see it.

It can take some time until all the metrics are displayed after the monitoring instance is provisioned.

Viewing metrics

Predefined dashboard for File Storage for VPC

When you launch the file share dashboard, you can see graphs that show the following metrics:

• Share usage: available capacity, used capacity, total capacity
• Throughput: read, write, and maximum throughput
• IOPS: read, write, maximum

The displayed metrics contain a timestamp in UNIX epoch time and the metric value for the time intervals that end at that timestamp. You can specify different scopes, and the time interval over which to report the metrics. The following time intervals are supported in the IBM Cloud Monitoring dashboard:

• 10 seconds
• 1 minute
• 10 minutes
• 1 hour
• 6 hours
• 2 weeks
• Custom

However, the system queries file share information hourly. Therefore, selecting an interval that is less than 1 hour is not recommended.

When you create a file share, the data for the new share can take up to an hour or an hour and 15 minutes to appear in the dashboard. Changes in usage and share characteristics, such as an increase in capacity or a change in IOPS, can take from 15 to 30 minutes to be reflected in the graphs.

You can also create custom dashboards through the web UI or programmatically. You can back up and restore dashboards by using Python scripts or the IBM Cloud Monitoring REST API. You can also copy and share dashboards through the web UI. For more information, see Dashboards.

ibm_is_share_throughput_read{ibm_ctype="public", ibm_is_generation="2", ibm_location="us-south-1", ibm_resource="032ab79f-f2f8-4e1b-a676-d0c3faf9659a", ibm_resource_type="share", ibm_scope="7e11faa285f74ed19cc89f5d6fecb212", ibm_service_name="is", ibm_is_resource_name="test-share-1"}
ibm_is_share_throughput_write{ibm_ctype="public", ibm_is_generation="2", ibm_location="us-south-1", ibm_resource="032ab79f-f2f8-4e1b-a676-d0c3faf9659a", ibm_resource_type="share", ibm_scope="7e11faa285f74ed19cc89f5d6fecb212", ibm_service_name="is", ibm_is_resource_name="test-share-1"}
ibm_is_share_throughput_max{ibm_ctype="public", ibm_is_generation="2", ibm_location="us-south-1", ibm_resource="032ab79f-f2f8-4e1b-a676-d0c3faf9659a", ibm_resource_type="share", ibm_scope="7e11faa285f74ed19cc89f5d6fecb212", ibm_service_name="is", ibm_is_resource_name="test-share-1"}
ibm_is_share_iops_read{ibm_ctype="public", ibm_is_generation="2", ibm_location="us-south-1", ibm_resource="032ab79f-f2f8-4e1b-a676-d0c3faf9659a", ibm_resource_type="share", ibm_scope="7e11faa285f74ed19cc89f5d6fecb212", ibm_service_name="is", ibm_is_resource_name="test-share-1"}
ibm_is_share_iops_write{ibm_ctype="public", ibm_is_generation="2", ibm_location="us-south-1", ibm_resource="032ab79f-f2f8-4e1b-a676-d0c3faf9659a", ibm_resource_type="share", ibm_scope="7e11faa285f74ed19cc89f5d6fecb212", ibm_service_name="is", ibm_is_resource_name="test-share-1"}
ibm_is_share_iops_max{ibm_ctype="public", ibm_is_generation="2", ibm_location="us-south-1", ibm_resource="032ab79f-f2f8-4e1b-a676-d0c3faf9659a", ibm_resource_type="share", ibm_scope="7e11faa285f74ed19cc89f5d6fecb212", ibm_service_name="is", ibm_is_resource_name="test-share-1"}
ibm_is_share_capacity_total{ibm_ctype="public", ibm_is_generation="2", ibm_location="us-south-1", ibm_resource="032ab79f-f2f8-4e1b-a676-d0c3faf9659a", ibm_resource_type="share", ibm_scope="7e11faa285f74ed19cc89f5d6fecb212", ibm_service_name="is", ibm_is_resource_name="test-share-1"}
ibm_is_share_capacity_used{ibm_ctype="public", ibm_is_generation="2", ibm_location="us-south-1", ibm_resource="032ab79f-f2f8-4e1b-a676-d0c3faf9659a", ibm_resource_type="share", ibm_scope="7e11faa285f74ed19cc89f5d6fecb212", ibm_service_name="is", ibm_is_resource_name="test-share-1"}
ibm_is_share_mount_targets_count_count{ibm_ctype="public", ibm_is_generation="2", ibm_location="us-south-1", ibm_resource="032ab79f-f2f8-4e1b-a676-d0c3faf9659a", ibm_resource_type="share", ibm_scope="7e11faa285f74ed19cc89f5d6fecb212", ibm_service_name="is", ibm_is_resource_name="test-share-1"}

File Storage for VPC metrics dictionary

Each metric is composed of the following metadata types:

• Metric name - Name of the collected metric.
• Metric type - Determines whether the metric value is a counter metric or a gauge metric. Each of these metrics is of the gauge type, which represents a single numerical value that can arbitrarily fluctuate over time.
• Value type - The file share metrics are displayed as integer and floating point numbers.
• Segment - How you want IBM Cloud Monitoring to divide and display the monitoring metrics.

Attributes for segmentation

You can split the metrics that IBM Cloud Monitoring presents into various visualizations in the IBM Cloud Monitoring dashboard, allowing views of different metrics based on your preference.

Monitoring alerts

In the IBM Cloud Monitoring service, you can configure single alerts and multi-condition alerts to notify about problems that might require attention. When an alert is triggered, you can be notified through 1 or more notification channels. An alert definition can generate multi-channel notifications.

For example, when your file share is low on available capacity, it can cause problems with replication. So you might want to create an alert for when your file share reaches 75%, 90%, and 95% of capacity used. When the metric threshold is reached, you can be notified of it through email, Slack, PagerDuty, or another channel. For more information, see Working with alerts and events.