IBM Storage Insights Pro offers powerful grouping features — Applications, Departments, and General Groups — to help organize, segment and monitor storage resources effectively. Grouping allows you to select from your monitored resources and isolate them for ease of monitoring and alerting. For example, grouping your OTLP workloads from your Oracle database volumes and hosts; coalescing volumes and hosts from multiple resources which make up your finance department; isolating the volumes, hosts, fabric that consist of your ecommerce application. Grouping provides visibility into a specific portion of your organizations’ infrastructure, where you can view the capacity, space usage, performance, create alerts, generate reports, and more.
· Improved Monitoring: View performance and capacity metrics at logical group levels.
· Faster Troubleshooting: Quickly identify affected resources when issues arise.
· Custom Alerts: Define alerts based on group-specific thresholds and behaviors.
· Business Alignment: Map your infrastructure resources to business units and applications for better visibility and provide reports to stakeholders.
5 Reasons to Utilize Storage Insights Groups:
1. Enhanced Visibility & Contextual Monitoring
Grouping resources allows you to:
· See performance and capacity in context — not just raw metrics, but how they relate to business functions.
· Understand impact faster: If an application slows down, you can immediately see which storage hosts, volumes, filesets and vaults are involved.
· Correlate issues across resources that support the business functions.
2. Streamline Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis
When issues arise...
· Pinpoint affected resources faster by looking at the group-level performance metrics, isolating the data down to the group resources.
· Reduce noise: Instead of sifting through storage system level alerts, you can focus on alerts tied to critical applications, departments, and general groups.
· Historical trends of storage usage, capacity, and performance within groups help identify recurring bottlenecks or capacity issues where they matter.
3. Business Alignment & Reporting
Applications and Departments mirror your business organization structure, making it easier to:
· Organize resources specific to the business/service, helping prioritize based on business impact.
· Report usage and costs to stakeholders, using the built-in Chargeback report.
· Justify infrastructure investments based on actual needs with historical usage.
4. Targeted Alerting
· Create custom alerts on a group, such as when used capacity of a critical application exceeds 75%.
· Sidestep alerts at the storage system level — focus on what matters most, down at the group level.
· Help enforce SLA compliance by monitoring and alerting on your key business services.
5. Flexible Resource Organization
Groups offer a way to:
· Monitor shared infrastructure (e.g., volumes used by application, hosts used by application, etc.).
· Group resources by department, geography, application, tier, etc.
· Create ad-hoc collections for testing, monitoring, or audit purposes.
Conclusion
The Group feature in IBM Storage Insights Pro provides a powerful way to organize, segment and monitor your resources effectively.
References
· For more information, see the Storage Insights documentation topics:
· Creating applications
· Creating departments
· Creating general groups
· For details on IBM Storage Insights, please refer our product page https://www.ibm.com/products/storage-insights
· For a hands-on experience with IBM Storage Insights, please use our demo instance https://demo.insights.ibm.com/