EMC Isilon InsightIQ 3.1.1 enhancements

No tool is so perfect that it cannot be improved. There’s no knife that couldn’t be sharper, no couch that couldn’t be comfier, no paperweight that couldn’t be heavier. EMC Isilon InsightIQ is a powerful tool, but it can always be made more powerful. That’s why we recently released InsightIQ  3.1.1: to make InsightIQ run faster and more reliably than ever before.

Enhancements

SPOILER ALERT: The following text describes some of the awesome new enhancements of InsightIQ 3.1.1. DO NOT READ if you just want to be pleasantly surprised when you download it.

Speed

Have you ever hiked up a mountain only to discover that your backpack was full of rocks? If so, you’re a really bad camper (or possibly just a geologist), but either way, you could have made that hike a lot faster without the rocks.

Image by akunamatata on Flickr
Image by akunamatata on Flickr

You may notice while running the new version of InsightIQ that it’s a lot faster than before. We’ve removed the rocks by tweaking InsightIQ to run more efficiently, including making improvements to debugging behavior. We’ve removed a lot of unnecessary debugging effort, which frees InsightIQ resources to work on more important things.

We’ve also improved InisghtIQ’s datastore technology. In previous versions, InsightIQ would let disk-space usage data take up more than its fair share of space in the InsightIQ datastore. InsightIQ 3.1.1 makes sure that free space is divided up equally for all.

Stability

InsightIQ 3.1.1 includes improvements to monitoring stability, especially for large clusters. Earlier instances of InsightIQ would request a lot of data from large clusters all at once, which could cause the clusters to become confused and passive aggressive. InsightIQ 3.1.1 has learned to be more patient and build a healthier relationship between it and the monitored clusters.

We’ve also improved stability by correcting an error in InsightIQ’s timeout behavior. Have you ever noticed InsightIQ’s connection timing out more than usual? This was likely due to InsightIQ interpreting a timeout value of 0 as actually meaning 0 (instead of infinity). We’ve reconfigured InsightIQ to fix this issue and stop taking things so literally.

Finally, we’ve made some adjustments to reduce “data retrieval delayed” errors. When previous versions of InsightIQ would lose a connection to the cluster, InsightIQ would sometimes report a data retrieval delayed error indefinitely, rather than report that the connection had been severed. This led to some difficulty diagnosing the issue.

Learn more

Start a conversation about Isilon content

Have a question or feedback about Isilon content? Visit the online EMC Isilon Community to start a discussion. If you have questions or feedback about this blog, or comments about the video specifically, contact us at isi.knowledge@emc.com. To provide documentation feedback or request new content, contact isicontent@emc.com.

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About the Author: Patrick Kreuch