Storage infrastructure is the foundation on which modern digital businesses run today. With increasing adoption of technologies like virtualization, IoT, AI and cloud-native apps, the infrastructure needs to keep pace with growing scale and complexity.
Any slowdowns or outages in storage systems directly impact user productivity and business revenue. According to an IDC study, organizations lose an average of $244,000 for every hour of storage downtime. Given the enormous costs, it is imperative to monitor infrastructure health proactively.
This is where specialized storage monitoring tools come in. They provide complete visibility into capacity, performance, data protection and usage trends across heterogeneous storage deployments.
By leveraging storage monitoring software, infrastructure teams can:
- Anticipate problems before applications and data access are disrupted
- Optimize existing storage resources and plan capacity expansion scientifically
- Ensure resiliency against component failures and disasters
- Troubleshoot issues faster through actional insights
- Make strategic decisions aligned with business objectives
Let‘s examine 8 leading solutions in this space through an in-depth comparative analysis.
Salient Features of Storage Monitoring Tools
There is a wide variety of solutions available from incident monitoring focused tools to holistic AIOps driven analytics platforms. When evaluating options, keep these vital capabilities in mind:
Auto-discovery – Automatically track storage devices connected across infrastructure
Customized Dashboard – Unified console providing health/capacity utilization overview
In-depth Analytics – Strategic and actional insights from usage trends
Threshold-based Alerts – Proactively warn on faults, failures and anomalies
Root Cause Analysis – Accelerate troubleshooting by mapping events to effects
Custom Reporting – Flexible storage analysis reports for planning
Forecasting & Modelling – Predict capacity expansion needs based on historical data
Open Standards Support – Leverage common interfaces for broader visibility
Now let‘s examine 8 leading solutions in this space through an in-depth comparative analysis.
1. Paessler PRTG
Paessler PRTG offers unified infrastructure monitoring capabilities including extensive storage performance visibility.
It can track metrics across physical disks, controllers, ports, caches as well as popular NAS, SAN and hyperconverged platforms. Seamless support for VMware and Microsoft hypervisor storage stacks enables optimized deployment in virtualized environments.
Key Features:
- Auto-discovery of all storage systems and visualization through maps
- Customizable dashboards with health and utilization insights
- Alerting on hardware failures, throughput thresholds etc
- In-depth historical reporting for capacity planning
- Specialized plugins for EMC, NetApp, Nutanix, Pure Storage
- Bandwidth monitoring between app servers and storage
- Supports major public cloud storage services
- Free trial available without any commitment
PRTG transforms raw storage metrics into intuitive dashboards. With meaningful visualization and alerts, it allows administrators to quickly detect bottlenecks across heterogeneous storage infrastructure.
2. ManageEngine OpManager
ManageEngine OpManager is a widely used NMS that offers add-on capabilities to monitor storage environments spanning SAN, NAS, DAS and tape libraries – all from a unified console.
It provides deep visibility into utilization, throughput, latency and IOPS metrics across popular vendors like NetApp, Pure, Nutanix, Quantum, Hitachi etc. OpManager analyzes historical usage patterns and helps forecast capacity expansion requirements easily.
Key Highlights:
- Auto-discovery of SAN/NAS storage components
- Performance dashboards showing metrics like IOPS, latency, queue depth etc
- Multi-vendor storage systems support
- Alerting on faults, disk failures, capacity thresholds
- Custom reporting on volume statistics
- Forecasting of utilization growth trends
With support for integrated storage infrastructure management, OpManager simplifies planning and administration by correlating discrete data points into an intuitive big picture.
3. SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor
SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor is purpose-built to provide unified visibility into health, performance and capacity utilization trends across heterogeneous storage deployments spanning on-premise SAN/NAS systems to public cloud data stores.
It offers storage analytics capabilities for 20+ platforms including Dell EMC, HPE Nimble, Pure Storage, IBM Spectrum Scale. Deep integration with Microsoft SQL and Oracle database platforms enables correlated analysis of storage IO dependencies.
Core Features:
- Performance dashboards for disks, volumes, controllers
- Database and application correlation
- Forecasting capacity usage and collisions
- Custom reporting across storage tiers
- Alerting on hardware failures and latency
- Starting at $1,885 for up to 10 storage devices
Solarwinds SRM contextualizes raw storage metrics for faster analysis and troubleshooting. With predictive modelling capabilities, it ensures optimal storage planning aligned to business needs.
4. Nagios XI
Nagios XI provides extensive monitoring and performance analytics for storage infrastructure, servers, networks beyond traditional IT infrastructure.
It offers customizable dashboards to track utilization, IOPS, throughput and latency across SAN, NAS, DAS devices while correlating backend application dependencies.
Core Features:
- Fully customizable dashboards and reporting
- Auto-discovery of connected storage devices
- Alerting based on user-defined thresholds
- Storage capacity analytics for planning
- Support for 400+ applications, systems, services
- Available as on-premise or SaaS platform
Nagios leverages an open data model to ingest metrics from any storage device or API endpoint. Advanced data visualization, forecasting and what-if modelling provide actional insights to optimize existing storage ROI while designing adequate capacity for future growth.
5. IntelliMagic Vision
IntelliMagic Vision offers an AIOps-driven storage analytics platform that contextualizes application workload behaviors and infrastructure metrics to shine the light on storage performance blind spots preemptively.
It combines real-time monitoring, topology mapping and ML-based analytics to detect anomalies, forecast capacity risks and enables root cause analysis down to storage controllers and disk groups.
Salient Capabilities:
- Application-centric performance dashboards
- Cross-stack infrastructure topology visualization
- Workload profiling and dependency mapping
- Root cause analysis for storage issues
- Custom reporting on storage KPIs
- Capacity analytics and risk modelling
IntelliMagic Vision builds an application dependency map that spots threats to storage uptime and business continuity through workload pattern analysis. Its predictive analytics detects capacity risks proactively even before applications are impacted.
6. Power Admin Storage Monitor
Power Admin Storage Monitor offers deep visibility into data consumption, access patterns and growth trends across unstructured NAS storage deployments.
It scans millions of files across CIFS and NFS shares to spotlight redundant, stale and temporary data bloating up existing capacity. Detailed auditing provides insights into storage wasted due to broken user quotas and unused home directories.
Core Highlights:
- Discover distribution trends across shares
- Establish user-wise storage quotas
- Alerting on low disk space thresholds
- Scheduled reporting on utilization
- Track storage allocated to users, groups etc
- Starting at $995 for 25 IT elements
By shining a light on storage waste and ownership, Power Admin Storage Monitor enables reclaiming of unused capacity for better efficiency and planning future growth accurately.
7. LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor offers infrastructure monitoring capabilities across compute, network and crucially – storage systems.
It auto-discovers traditional SAN/NAS storage, SDS infra, hyperconverged platforms and public cloud storage services like AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage. Detailed analytics offer historical trends, forecasting and anomaly detection using machine learning algorithms.
Key Monitoring Features:
- Unified resource utilization dashboards
- Threshold-based alerting for faults and events
- Anomaly detection using ML algorithms
- Storage performance analytics and modelling
- Support for Dell, Pure Storage, Nutanix, Azure
- Starting at $1,200 per month
LogicMonitor correlates application behaviors with supporting resources to simplify diagnostics of performance issues across stacks. Its predictive modelling accurately forecasts capacity expansions taking seasonal usage spikes into account.
8. eG Enterprise
eG Enterprise is an APM platform that offers advanced monitoring capabilities for storage infrastructure spanning on-premise SAN/NAS systems to public cloud stores like AWS S3 and Azure Blob storage.
It auto-discovers the storage topology and current utilization metrics. The unified dashboard visualizes overall health status, historical trends and provides proactive anomaly alerts powered by machine learning algorithms.
Key Benefits:
- Instant overview of storage health and risks
- Analysis of workload patterns and contention
- Correlation of app performance with storage
- Custom reporting and rightsizing recommendations
- Predictive analytics using AI/ML
- Public cloud storage optimization
- Support for all major platforms – EMC, NetApp, Pure
eG Enterprise enables businesses to maximize storage ROI through actional insights that optimize capacity, discover savings and prevent outages across heterogeneous infrastructure.
Comparative Analysis
Here is a head-to-head comparison of the leading storage monitoring tools across some key evaluation parameters:
Based on business needs, budget and use case – IT managers can shortlist tools that best fit their requirements using such a framework.
While OpManager and SolarWinds SRM are ideal for SMB setups, Paessler PRTG, Nagios and LogicMonitor suit medium scale enterprises. Larger businesses can invest in advanced AIOps-driven analytics platforms like IntelliMagic Vision and eG Enterprise.
Strategic Considerations
Beyond core monitoring, analytics and alerting capabilities, buyers must evaluate their next-generation storage infrastructure management needs aligned to business objectives.
Here are few top strategic parameters when selecting a future-proof storage monitoring system:
- Ability to track on-premise and multi-cloud deployments
- Open frameworks that facilitate integrations into existing tools
- Unified data lakes that contextualize discrete events
- Advanced Machine Learning that simplifies root cause analysis
- Customizable dashboards that align to persona-based consumption
- Flexible licensing models that provide value predictability
The right monitoring strategy will empower AI-driven autonomous infrastructures that maximize ROI of storage investments.
Key Takeaways
As data generation continues to explode from IoT endpoints to cloud data warehouses, storage systems face greater volatility, variety and volume threats than ever before. Businesses must invest in proactive monitoring to avoid financial and reputation loss due to infrastructure outages.
Specialized storage monitoring solutions like the ones highlighted in this article, can help optimize existing capacity, enhance visibility to strengthen utilization and plan capacity expansion scientifically.
Evaluate the core capabilities against current and future infrastructure management requirements to choose the apt tools for your environment. AIOps-driven analytics platforms powered by machine learning offer strategic value in building intelligent data infrastructures ready for Industry 4.0 transformations.
