Monitoring your disks regularly is important for knowing whether any of your disks are expected to run out of free space and how to allocate disk space for programs demanding it or expected to demand it and planning which programs use which disks in order to optimize disk usage to the organization’s systems.
Usually users and managers perform disk analysis only when they encounter problems that are suspected to be related to the disks or known to be related to the disks such as quick disk space consumption, long loading time for programs, not being able to save files, halted transactions, etc.
AimBetter enables you to easily analyze your disks’ performance, usage and activities and lets you know any information related to your disks any time and helps you plan which programs should be using which disks and when.
As can be seen in the following case study – http://ryltech.wpengine.com/articles/case-study-system-timeouts/ regularly monitoring the disks could prevent a serious timeouts problem that was bothering one of our clients for a few days before he contacted us and asked for our help. Luckily, that customer had AimBetter installed on his main server so we could discover the cause of the problem in 5 minutes. Reading the linked case study is highly recommended.
In AimBetter, the Disk section of OS Tools is divided to 3 subsections: Hot Files, Disk Breakdown and Physical Disk.
The Disk section of the OS Tools is a complementary of the Disk section of the performance screen as it gives you detailed information about your disk usage, files causing most disk IOs, processes on each disk and disk metrics.
The hot files subsection presents the following information about each one of the top 20 IO consuming files in your disks: Disk number, File path and name, reads/second, KB/read, writes/second, KB/write.
The disk breakdown subsections presents the following information about each running process on the disk: process or executable file name, process ID, authority (user), reads/second, KB/read, writes/second, KB/write.
The physical disk subsection presents the following information: physical disk counters metrics, physical disk idle time percentage and physical disk performance counters (Average Disk seconds/Read, Average Disk seconds/Transfer, Average Disk seconds/Write).
As shown above, the following counters are monitored: % disk read time, % disk time, % disk write time, average disk bytes/read, average disk bytes/transfer, average disk bytes/write, average disk read queue length, average disk write queue length, current disk queue length, disk bytes/second, disk read bytes/second, disk reads/second, disk transfers/second, disk write bytes/second, disk writes/second and split IO/second. For each counter you receive the following information: counter name, counter instance (shows meaning), mean value, minimum value and maximum values. All values refer to the most recent round minute.
AimBetter provides thorough information about all the disk metrics and displays every detail that has a meaning regarding your machines’ performance. It immediately tells you about bottlenecks that need to be taken care of and lets you know whatever you need to know about your disks’ performance in any time, whether it’s real time or history, as AimBetter saves its logs for as long as you set it to so you don’t need to reproduce a problem you encounter in order to investigate its cause, for more information please read the case study linked above.