InsightIQ 4.0 – the latest in Data Insights for Isilon

Isilon environments are large, powerful and efficient, but sometimes actions by users can negatively impact that performance and efficiency.  In these cases, storage admins need tools to quickly understand what’s going on and who’s doing what and how resources are being used.

We collectively call these needs “Data Insights” and have defined three vectors of innovation to address these needs:

  • Actionable Understanding: quick access to relevant data that helps to understand what’s going on and who’s doing what
  • Improved Storage Utilization: tools to track and manage how resources are being used
  • Personalized Dynamic Information: enabling customers to get exactly the information and value they need out of their Isilon environment

The “showcase application” for Data Insights in your Isilon environment is InsightIQ.  InsightIQ provides easy and powerful drill-down of thousands of real-time performance statistics to help admins quickly interpret and understand what’s going on in their Isilon clusters, and even who’s doing what type of activity.  The screenshot below shows just one example of breaking down a cluster’s network throughput by client.  Mind you this is just the first level of drill down.  You can also apply filters to explore more details about the activity of that top user.  Views like this are available for a wide range of real-time performance metrics including node performance, disk performance, cluster events and more.Insight IQ Dashboard

This week we released version 4.0 of InsightIQ which rolls up all the foundational improvements that were delivered throughout 2015 increasing performance and reliability as well as introducing new capabilities and support for the latest release of OneFS, version 8.0.

The exciting enhancements delivered in InsightIQ v4.0 include:

  • Capacity Utilization Forecast Tool (see screen capture below) at the cluster level that can also be broken out by tier and nodepool to help predict when and what type of resources will be needed to support the growth trends in your Isilon environment.
  • Improved management options for the data collected, stored and analyzed by InsightIQ.
  • Deliver fresher insights on the Isilon File System leveraging the improved FSA (File System Analytics) capability in OneFS 8.0 which was released earlier this month.

Insight IQ Reporting

Best of all, in October 2015, EMC made InsightIQ a zero-cost solution!  This move has encouraged more and more customers to take advantage of the great Data Insights capabilities of their Isilon environments, and positioned them to reap benefits throughout this year as we continue to make improvements to InsightIQ.

Try out InsightIQ today, if you haven’t already started using it!  If you have InsightIQ, upgrade to this newest release and start down the path of improving your Data Insights experience in your Isilon environment.

About the Author: Patrick Lynch