Monitoring, Performance, and Troubleshooting
Where to look
Prism Element and Prism Central show alerts, health, capacity, IOPS, latency, and throughput. NCC runs cluster checks. Files adds File Analytics for audit, capacity, and access patterns. Objects exposes bucket and endpoint metrics. Volumes shows Volume Group performance. Establish a baseline before troubleshooting so you can separate normal peaks from faults.
Troubleshooting sequence
- Identify scope: one share, bucket, or LUN, or the whole cluster.
- Check Prism alerts and NCC results first.
- For Files, check FSVM health, AD, DNS, NTP, VIP, and SMB or NFS permissions.
- For Objects, check endpoint reachability, TLS, access key, bucket policy, and request signature.
- For Volumes, check IQN allowlist, CHAP, data services IP, multipath, and LUN presentation.
- Escalate with timestamps, affected object, and recent changes.
Worked example
Users report slow SMB access. Prism shows no cluster-wide alert, and File Analytics shows high latency on one share. Check whether the FSVM is healthy and whether client antivirus scanning or a large copy is saturating that share. A cluster storage problem would normally affect more than one share, so scope narrows the cause.
Traps
Do not start with low-level commands when Prism alerts already show a clear cause. Do not confuse capacity pressure with latency. Do not ignore NTP or DNS for Files authentication. Do not assume an S3 403 is a network outage.
Key points
- Prism and NCC are the first health checks.
- File Analytics adds share-level audit and capacity insight.
- Scope a fault before changing configuration.
- Files troubleshooting includes AD, DNS, NTP, and VIP.
- Volumes troubleshooting includes IQN, CHAP, and the data services IP.