Example of how to monitor cloud VM storage usage?

[sloshburch]

Does anyone have examples of how to use Splunk to monitor cloud VM storage usage?

[sloshburch · Accepted solution]

The Splunk Product Best Practices team helped produce this response. Read more about example use cases in the Splunk Platform Use Cases manual.

For more information about this example see Virtualization Module KPIs and thresholds in the Splunk IT Service Intelligence Modules manual.

Set up this example use case to monitor your VM storage usage. After you add data to the Splunk platform, you gain visibility into your cloud deployments to ensure health of those systems.

Load data

How to implement: This example use case depends on logs and events from cloud providers.

Install the appropriate add-ons for the platforms that exist in your environment.

• Splunk Add-on for Amazon Web Services
• Splunk Add-on for Amazon Kinesis Firehose
• Splunk Add-on for Microsoft Cloud Services
• Splunk Add-on for Microsoft Windows
• Splunk Add-on Unix and Linux

You can find installation and configuration instructions in the Details tab of each Splunkbase item. Additional configuration details are available in the Operating System Module configurations section in the Splunk IT Service Intelligence Modules manual.

Best practice: For more granular results with scripted inputs, you can increase the frequency at which the input runs using the interval setting in inputs.conf. Running the input more frequently consumes more storage, and running it less frequently uses less, which can affect license consumption. The default interval is 60 seconds. See Scripted Input in the input.conf topic of the Splunk Enterprise Admin manual.

Best practice: For all of the data inputs, specify a desired target index to provide a more sustainable practice for data access controls and retention models. By default, Splunk collects the data in the default index named main.

Get insights

Run the following search.

index=* tag=virtualmachine tag=storage tag=performance tag=cloud

| timechart span=15min min(storage_used_percent) BY host

Best practice: In searches, replace the asterisk in index=* with the name of the index that contains the data. By default, Splunk stores data in the main index. Therefore, index=* becomes index=main. Use the OR operator to specify one or multiple indexes to search. For example, index=main OR index=security. See About managing indexes and How indexing works in Splunk docs for details.

Help

The Operating System Module troubleshooting section in the Splunk IT Service Intelligence Modules manual lists troubleshooting resources that you can apply to this example use case.

If no results appear, it may be because the add-ons were not deployed to the search heads, so the needed tags and fields are not defined. Deploy the add-ons to the search heads to access the needed tags and fields. See About installing Splunk add-ons in the Splunk Add-ons manual.

For troubleshooting tips that you can apply to all add-ons, see Troubleshoot add-ons in the Splunk Add-ons manual.

For more support, post a question to the Splunk Answers community.