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One View to Rule Them All: Centralised Management of IBM Storage Insights Instances via the Multitenant Dashboard

By Sushil Sharma posted 24 days ago

  

Author: @Sushil Sharma , @Abhishek Rane 

IBM Storage Insights is a robust, cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform that provides users with a centralized view of their storage infrastructure. While it excels at delivering deep insights and operational visibility within a single tenant, many users manage multiple IBM Storage Insights tenants—often segregating them by environment type, business unit, or geographic region.

In practice, organizations commonly isolate tenants to support distinct use cases—for example, separating production environments from test or development environments. However, managing these tenants independently can lead to inefficiencies. Users are often required to log in separately to each tenant, with no unified dashboard available to correlate performance, capacity, or alert information across environments.

As the number of tenants grows, the challenge of maintaining visibility, consistency, and responsiveness increases. This gap highlights the need for a solution that can provide cross-tenant monitoring and governance—a capability that IBM addresses with its Multitenant Dashboard.

What is Multitenant Dashboard?

The IBM Storage Insights Multitenant Dashboard is a centralized interface that provides users with a unified, aggregated view of all their IBM Storage Insights tenants. Designed to address the growing need for consolidated monitoring, this dashboard empowers users to manage and monitor multiple storage environments from a single pane of glass.

The Multitenant Dashboard acts as an ecosystem enabler, leveraging IBM Storage Insights' REST API framework to seamlessly integrate multiple tenants. Onboarding is simple and secure: users authenticate using their IBMid and are presented with a clean, empty dashboard from which they can begin to add and manage tenants.

To connect tenants, users only need to generate an API key from each IBM Storage Insights instance they wish to manage. Once added, the dashboard displays aggregated inventory, capacity, and performance data across all connected tenants, allowing users to gain instant visibility into their overall storage landscape.

This capability is especially valuable for enterprises, managed service providers (MSPs), and IT teams overseeing diverse environments, enabling streamlined operations, improved resource planning, and faster issue resolution.

Add your tenant to the Multitenant Dashboard

To begin monitoring multiple environments through the IBM Storage Insights Multitenant Dashboard, users must first connect their individual tenants. The process is straightforward and secure, relying on IBM's REST API infrastructure and role-based access controls.

Step 1: Generate an API Key

Before a tenant can be added, an API Key must be generated from the target IBM Storage Insights tenant. This requires:

  • Admin access to the tenant.
  • Navigation to:
    Settings → User Access Management → [Select User] → Create API Key.

Note: If you are not an administrator of the tenant, you will need to contact the tenant admin to generate and share the API Key for your use.

Step 2: Add Tenant in the Multitenant Dashboard

Once the API Key is available, log in to the Multitenant Dashboard using your IBMid. Use the “Add Tenant” option to register a new tenant. The dialog will prompt for the following:

  • A friendly name (used for easy identification in the dashboard)
  • The tenant UUID
  • The API Key

All submitted credentials are securely encrypted and stored only for reference by the authenticated user.

Step 3: Backend Validation and Dynamic Data Retrieval

Upon submission, the backend service of the Multitenant Dashboard validates the API Key and the tenant URL. Once verified, it begins issuing REST API queries to fetch real-time metrics from the added tenant.

Importantly, no tenant data is persisted. Instead, the data is dynamically retrieved and rendered in the user interface to generate aggregated dashboards, alerts, and insights across all connected tenants.

Summary

As organizations grow and diversify their IT environments, managing multiple IBM Storage Insights tenants has become increasingly complex. The IBM Storage Insights Multitenant Dashboard addresses this challenge by providing a unified, centralised view across all tenants, enabling users to efficiently monitor, compare, and manage their entire storage landscape.

By leveraging REST API integration and secure authentication, the dashboard allows users to easily onboard tenants using API keys, without compromising security. The intuitive interface presents dynamic, aggregated views of inventory, capacity, and alerts, empowering IT teams with actionable insights and operational clarity.

Ideal for enterprises, service providers, and multi-environment teams, the Multitenant Dashboard streamlines cross-tenant visibility, reduces administrative overhead, and helps ensure better planning and faster issue resolution.

IBM Storage Insights continues to expand its monitoring capabilities to meet evolving customer needs, and the Multitenant Dashboard is a key step toward centralised, intelligent infrastructure management.

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