Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Christopher Vollmar IBM Storage Architect supporting customers in Canada and the Caribbean

It's the month of September, and many are going back to school! Whether its your first day of class, or your coming back as an upperclassman it’s a chance to approach something from a new perspective.

I thought this week would be a good chance to think about going back to school and going back to basics. There are two things that come to mind with that; support and monitoring of storage.

When it comes to support, one thing we can always check on is the ‘Call Home’ status of the storage system. In case you didn't know, the IBM Storage systems have the ability to connect back to IBM Support using the [Call Home] function that’s part of the solution.

When Call Home identifies a potential problem, it notifies the administrator and IBM Support of the issue and transmits diagnostic data about the problem to the IBM Support Center.

Depending on your IBM Storage platform, from the IBM Spectrum Virtualize / Storwize platform to the IBM DS8000, to the IBM FlashSystem family, you can find out how to [enable Call Home here]. It’s a good time of year just to check to make sure Call Home is working and enabled for your Storage solution.

As for monitoring, did you know that [IBM Storage Insights] is available for IBM Storage solutions? IBM Storage Insights provides an excellent level of visibility across your entire storage environment from performance to support needs, as you can see in this [guided tour].

There are [two editions] of the tool, but they only require one data collector.

• IBM Storage Insights offers an enterprise-wide dashboard for monitoring the basic health, capacity and performance of your IBM block storage systems. This edition is included at no additional charge with most IBM storage maintenance contracts.
• IBM Storage Insights Pro is an upgrade available by subscription, and supports the same block storage, adds file and object storage, and provides additional details, analysis, and longer data history for even greater insight. This tracks a full year of metrics, rather than the most recent 24 hours kept by the standard edition.

IBM Storage Insights also streamlines your interaction with IBM support. It leverages the Call Home features of the system as well as provides a data collector, automatic support for log uploading, and easy ticket creation and management. IBM support staff use read-only access to diagnostic information about monitored storage systems to proactively help resolve problems and provide recommendations.

If you need more information around the security protocols in place for IBM Storage Insights, you can leverage the ['Storage Insights Security Guide'].

You can start using IBM Storage Insights today! It will change how you look at your Storage environment and how you engage with IBM Support. If you want to learn even more about IBM Storage Insights,

Call Home support or really any topic when it comes to IBM Systems, IBM TechU is continuing this fall and you can attend one of the [IBM Systems Technical University]. events we have coming up in Bogota, Las Vegas, Sydney, Prague, and Bali.