Monitoring the vSAN environment is critical to the service provider’s successful implementation of the hyper-converged infrastructure.

Because vSAN is a policy-driven storage solution, provisioning and management are significantly simplified. vSAN automatically and dynamically matches requirements with underlying storage resources. With vSAN, many manual storage tasks are automated to deliver a more efficient and cost-effective operational model. However, from an operational aspect, providers have additional concerns and requirements that go beyond the simplification and streamlining of management. vSAN enables additional capabilities that allow providers to monitor and manage their vSAN infrastructure. This section describes considerations for monitoring best practices and design.

vSAN supports a number of monitoring capabilities. For basic monitoring of the datastores, vSAN can be monitored from the vSphere Web Client, where monitoring can occur on different objects, including clusters and datastores. When hosts participate in a vSAN cluster, they can also be monitored in the same way as any other host that vCenter Server manages.

From the cluster level, you can monitor the hosts’ physical disks and virtual disks that are participating with vSAN. When reviewing at the cluster level, capacity, operational status, health status, policy information, and compliance status can be seen for each host, VM, and disk on the vSAN datastore.

At the vSAN datastore level, you can view the standard performance information, state of the disks, status of the volume, and partition group information. In addition to these statistics, in vSAN 6.2, there is also a capacity monitoring page available as well as a number of new graphs and data points that provide performance information at the cluster, host, virtual machine, and virtual disk levels. In addition, the Time Range can also be modified to show information from the last few hours or a custom date and time range.