Top 10 Storage Monitoring Tools you must know about

Data storage is the backbone of every successful enterprise, facilitating seamless operations, decision-making, and innovation. However, with the exponential growth of data comes the daunting task of ensuring its security, accessibility, and optimal performance. This is where storage monitoring emerges as a critical aspect of IT infrastructure management.

This article dives deep into this topic, shedding light on its pivotal role in maintaining the health and efficiency of storage systems. From safeguarding against data breaches to preempting potential downtime, effective monitoring is indispensable for businesses aiming to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Yet, navigating the complexities of storage monitoring can be a challenge in itself. We will explain the key features that define top-tier storage monitoring tools, offering readers invaluable guidance in selecting the most suitable solution for their specific requirements. With an array of options available in the market, understanding the essential criteria for evaluation is essential.

To aid readers in their quest for the perfect monitoring tool, we will present a curated list of the top 10 solutions in the field, empowering organizations to make informed decisions that align with their objectives and budgetary constraints.

By illuminating the significance of proactive monitoring and equipping readers with the knowledge to navigate the diverse landscape of storage monitoring tools, we hope that this article will serve as a comprehensive roadmap for businesses seeking to optimize their storage infrastructure and help further their journey towards enhanced efficiency, resilience, and competitiveness in the digital age.

Frequently Asked Questions About Storage Monitoring

What Are Storage Monitoring Tools?

Storage monitoring tools are software applications or platforms designed to monitor and manage the performance, capacity, health, and availability of storage systems in an IT infrastructure.

These tools help organizations ensure optimal performance, prevent downtime, and troubleshoot issues related to storage resources. Some common features of storage monitoring tools include performance monitoring, capacity planning, alerting and notification, resource usage analysis, health and status monitoring and historical reporting and analysis.

Storage monitoring tools may be purpose built stand-alone tools or, more frequently, part of IT management solutions that offer a wide range of additional capabilities, such as network, virtualization, cloud or infrastructure monitoring.

Why Should You Invest in Storage Monitoring?

There are many reasons to invest in storage monitoring. Here are five of them, in no particular order.

1. Performance optimization: continuous monitoring can help you pinpoint issues and identify opportunities for optimization that will improve the performance of your storage infrastructure, sometimes without the need for hardware upgrades.

2. Security: monitoring allows you to spot early signs of uncommon behavior or usage patterns indicative of an intrusion attempt or ongoing attack. This will give you time to react and deploy countermeasures before a data breach occurs.

3. Resource allocation: find out where resources are being underutilized or overutilized, allowing you to redistribute them according to real needs to ensure the most effective usage of your systems.

4. Proactive maintenance: monitoring allows you to detect and fix potential issues before they become critical and result in outages that may affect the performance of your applications or even the profitability of your business.

5. Regulatory compliance: businesses that handle sensitive information, like financial or healthcare data, need to meet strict regulatory standards that specify how this information is stored and handled. Monitoring will allow you to prove compliance with these standards and secure approvals that may be crucial to keep your business running.

What to Look for When Choosing Storage Monitoring Tools?

Broadly speaking, there are 5 main features you need to look out for when choosing storage monitoring tools. Keep in mind that this may vary according to your specific needs.

• The capability to monitor many aspects of your storage infrastructure at once, be it on-premises or in the cloud.
• A centralized display of information from many sensors for better observability.
• Customizable alerts and automated notifications when alerts are triggered.
• Native and automated reporting features, so you can keep co-workers and management “in the loop”.
• A free trial period, so you can attest to how the tool works with your network infrastructure.

How to Do Storage Monitoring?

There are many storage monitoring tools, from as many different vendors, which may focus solely on a single aspect of the task or offer this capability as a subset of a broader range of features. We present a few of them below, in no particular order.

The Best Storage Monitoring Tools

PRTG, OpManager, PowerAdmin, EGEnterprise, IntelliMagic, Solarwinds, Stor2RRD, Nagios, LogicMonitor, Site24x7

PRTG

Paessler PRTG is a powerful and versatile tool based on monitoring elements called “sensors”. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, e.g. the traffic of a switch port, the CPU load of a server, the free space of a disk drive, and so on.

PRTG includes more than 250 built-in sensors for various tasks, device types, and use cases. Among those, there are more than 50 storage-related sensors which will allow you to monitor many kinds of storage systems, from a physical disk on a Linux server to dedicated systems built by Dell, HP, Buffalo, IBM and more.

PRTG also supports SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) monitoring. This is a widely adopted industry standard for device management, so you can monitor any SNMP-enabled storage device or system, even if there is no specific sensor for that particular model or vendor.

However, you are not limited to that. PRTG sensors can be combined as needed, which opens monitoring possibilities. You can even create custom sensors. For example, by deploying two sensors, you can create a hybrid tool capable of monitoring the free space on a Hyper-V Cluster shared volume and your Microsoft Azure storage account at the same time. All in a single pane of glass.

PRTG Network Monitor is available either with perpetual licenses (starting at US$ 1.899) or subscription licenses (starting at US$ 159 monthly), a flexible and affordable pricing scheme when compared with other tools. A 30-day free trial is available. There is also a free version for personal use that lets you monitor up to 100 sensors at no charge.

ManageEngine OpManager

ManageEngine OpManager offers comprehensive storage monitoring solutions for both physical and virtual storage devices, including SAN components, with advanced features such as performance monitoring which give you increased visibility, reduced downtime and simplified management.

It supports a wide range of storage devices from various manufacturers, including NetApp, Dell EMC, IBM, HPE, Pure Storage, Huawei, and many others. Monitoring features include

Disk Read and Write stats, capacity utilization monitoring, and storage growth trend graphs. There are predefined storage monitors, a dedicated storage monitoring dashboard, and configurable thresholds for storage performance monitoring.

Advanced storage capacity forecasting and planning features, including alerts on capacity threshold breaches and scheduled reports based on capacity trends, are also included. RAID management, Tape Library monitoring and management and Fabric Switch management round up the feature list.

Storage Monitoring with ManageEngine OpManager is available in three editions: Standard, Professional and Enterprise, with prices starting at US$ 245 per month for 25 devices on the Standard edition. Keep in mind that some features, like distributed infrastructure monitoring, are only available in the Enterprise edition. There is a 30-day free trial available.

PowerAdmin Storage Monitor

PowerAdmin Storage Monitor is a powerful storage monitoring tool that helps businesses improve efficiency by providing features such as file age reporting, disk space prediction, and user quota monitoring.

This tool can centrally monitor and report on multiple file servers, and quickly scan and catalog terabytes of file information to report on file ages, types, owners, duplicates, predict when disks will run out of space, monitor and alert on user and directory sizes, identify unused files to reduce costs, alert on changed files or low disk space, and more.

It runs as a service for continuous monitoring, and is capable of monitoring individual file sizes and user quotas, identify unused files, largest storage users, largest files, file type distribution, etc. Users can configure flexible actions in response to alerts, schedule the generation of HTTP-based reports or request Ad hoc reports for quick insights.

In contrast to other SaaS (Software as a Service) tools, PowerAdmin Storage Monitor is a traditional application that needs to be installed on a 64-bit Windows System running Windows Server (2008 SP2, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, 2022) or Client (7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11) operating systems. It is offered on a perpetual licensing model, with prices starting at US$ 250 per license for up to 10 licenses, with progressive discounts the more licenses you acquire. A 30-day free trial is available.

eG Enterprise

eG Enterprise is a comprehensive storage monitoring solution, that allows users to evaluate, analyze, and troubleshoot storage environments effectively from a single dashboard and addresses various challenges faced by administrators in managing storage infrastructure.

Among those challenges are storage slowdowns affecting key applications, determining whether issues stem from storage or other tiers or diagnosing storage-related problems such as disk failure, SAN bottlenecks, excessive I/O activity, and in-memory caching.

Admins can monitor various storage devices simultaneously and correlate storage performance with other storage tiers from a central web console, with historical trends, baselines, and reports for infrastructure optimization.

It supports various storage device types from manufacturers including Dell, IBM, HP, EMC, and Hitachi, and SMI-S compliant devices as well, with features such as detection of temperature sensor failures, abnormal fan operations, power supply unit failures, excessive CPU resource utilization, identification of port failures, abnormal I/O traffic, disk slowdowns, and outstanding requests.

eG Enterprise pricing is based on the deployment model. SaaS/Cloud starts at $125 per month, subscription licenses start at $100/ month, and a minimum configuration for perpetual licenses starts at $10,000. There is a 30-day free trial available.

IntelliMagic Vision for SAN

IntelliMagic Vision for SAN is a comprehensive solution for monitoring the performance, capacity, and configuration of multivendor SAN storage environments, providing the information needed to ensure business continuity and meet SLAs.

It offers comprehensive Storage Performance Management, enabling proactive monitoring and optimization of multivendor SAN/NAS infrastructure. Its AI-driven capabilities detect issues and potential bottlenecks within storage arrays, reducing mean time to resolution and preventing delays in application performance.

For capacity planning and forecasting, IntelliMagic Vision tracks capacity metrics over time, allowing for safe predictions of storage growth and avoidance of capacity constraints. Change detection charts highlight utilization patterns deviating from a baseline, facilitating the identification of anomalous growth.

The solution also provides end-to-end configuration topology, seamlessly integrating VMware performance data with backend performance metrics. This holistic approach enables administrators to visualize the entire infrastructure from VMware guests to connected fabric ports and LUNs, simplifying management and troubleshooting.

IntelliMagic Vision for SAN is available as a cloud-based service or for on premises installation. Pricing is only available by quote, and a free trial is available upon request.

SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor

SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) software offers comprehensive multivendor NAS and SAN forecasting, performance, and capacity monitoring, with a user-friendly interface and integration with other SolarWinds products.

SRM supports storage devices made by NetApp, EMC, Hitachi, HP, Dell, IBM and many others, and sports a customizable user interface that allows you to see your entire storage infrastructure in a single window. Features like hotspot detection and performance monitoring help admins quickly detect issues and better allocate available resources.

The AppStack dashboard shows performance information across the entire application stack, and relationships between applications, physical servers, storage layers, and virtual hosts. Customizable reports deliver in-depth insights into your storage environment, from performance metrics to key capacity trends.

SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor is available as SaaS (subscription licensing) or with perpetual licensing. Detailed pricing information if available by quote, but starts at US$ 1.951 for subscription licenses and US$ 3.771 for perpetual ones. A 30-day free trial is available.

Stor2RRD

Stor2RRD is a free and Open Source monitoring solution which can analyze key infrastructure performance metrics of your storage, SAN and LAN devices, with proactive monitoring, troubleshooting and prognosis for all your infrastructure.

It supports storage devices from vendors such as NetApp, Dell EMC, Huawei, IBM, HPE, Hitachi, Lenovo and many others. It offers capacity monitoring with smart trending, health status, a heatmap for SAN port utilization and a customizable alerting system, including hardware-based alerts, with alert delivery options including email, Nagios integration, SNMP trap or by triggering an internal shell script.

Stor2RRD itself is free and runs under Linux. There are no software licenses, but customers with an active support contract get upgraded to the enterprise edition with additional features, such as an unlimited number of monitored devices, Proxy Agent, SAN Topology, unlimited and automated reporting, Ad hoc historical reporting, unlimited number of alerts, unlimited number of pools, volumes or SAN ports and an API for data export.

Customers with a support contract also get priority on bug fixes, assistance with installation, upgrade or migration from other tools, SLAs for critical issues (next business day), automation and customization of reports, development of new types of reports or data exports, and prolonged data retention, among other features. Pricing for support is available by quote.

Nagios XI

Nagios XI is a comprehensive solution for monitoring IT infrastructure components, with customizable features, scalability, and proactive alerts. Versatility is its main highlight: besides the many built-in features, this tool can be extended with “thousands of community-developed add-ons that extend monitoring and native alerting functionality”.

Storage monitoring is one of its many talents. Nagios XI offers “complete monitoring” of storage systems, including directory size, disk usage, file count, file presence, file size, S.M.A.R.T. status, RAID array status, and more.

Automated trending and capacity planning graphs help keep your IT teams, stakeholders, and users informed, with multi-tenancy support to ensure users only see the information they are authorized for. Proactive alerts can be sent via email, SMS text message, Slack, or Microsoft Teams.

Nagios XI is available in two editions, “Standard” and “Enterprise”, with licenses for 100 nodes starting at US$ 2,495. It only runs natively under Linux, more specifically distributions like CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu, or Debian. However, it can be run on Windows servers using virtualization solutions like VMWare, Virtual Box, or Hyper-V. There is a fully functional 30-day free trial, and a free and Open Source edition called Nagios Core, but with some features missing.

LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor offers comprehensive storage monitoring solutions for traditional on-premises, cloud-based, and hyper-converged storage systems, tracking availability, health, and performance of physical, virtual, and cloud storage systems crucial for IT infrastructure.

It supports traditional storage systems from vendors such as NetApp, Cisco, Dell Technologies, HPE, Pure Storage and others, hyper-converged and virtualized storage systems from Cisco HyperFlex, Nutanix, and VMware vSAN, to name a few, and also cloud storage systems like GCP, Azure, and AWS.

LogicMonitor offers proactive monitoring, with historical trends combined with best-practice thresholds for proactive issue prevention and correlation with application and network performance for a unified view. There is also capacity planning, with intelligent forecasting to avoid capacity issues and optimize resource utilization and dynamic thresholds for proactive alerts on storage usage trends.

Site24x7

Site24x7 offers a cloud-based storage monitoring tool that allows users to track the health and performance of various storage devices like NAS, RAID, tape libraries, and fabric switches from multiple vendors.

This tool can monitor any storage device supporting SNMP, and includes templates for RAID monitoring from vendors like NetApp, HP, EMC Isilon, Synology, Dell, and others. Connections, health, and status of your storage environment can be visualized using topology maps, layer-2 maps or customizable dashboards.

CPU, memory, disk, and volume metrics are monitored to ensure proper capacity planning and availability, with detailed information on disk count, battery status, disk read/write bytes, iSCSI/FCP operations, volume space, failed disk count, cache age, etc.

Trap messages can be instantly intercepted to raise alerts if there are any device issues or events, with alerts being delivered through tools such as Alarms One, ServiceDesk Plus, Microsoft Teams, Slack, PagerDuty, and Jira, among others.

Site24x7 is SaaS, with prices varying by the kind of monitoring you want to do: website, infrastructure, application performance, etc. “All in One” monitoring is available in three plans (Pro, Classic and Enterprise), starting at US$ 35 per month. Keep in mind that several features (like Advanced Monitoring and Log Management) are available as add-ons, which can quickly drive up the price. There is a 30-day free trial available.

Conclusion

As we have shown, there are storage monitoring solutions of all kinds, for businesses of all sizes and every need, from a simple shared volume on a server in a closet to multiple storage arrays deployed on a remote datacenter.

However, there is only one tool that has the flexibility to adapt itself to all of those scenarios: Paessler’s PRTG. It “ticks all the boxes” in our list of desired characteristics, and streamlines your workflow by enabling you to monitor all of your infrastructure with a single tool.

The built-in sensors cover many of the main use cases, without the need to purchase extras, so it can monitor your storage systems, but also your network, services, servers, IoT devices, cloud infrastructure, and much more. And it is extensible, which means you can deploy third-party sensors, or even develop your own, to cover specific needs.

That means you can do away with having to rely on a variety of individualized solutions, which can carry potential risks such as conflict with your current workflow and even network security issues.