Monitoring and detecting performance issues in today's complex applications is often a complicated and time consuming task. The multi-tiered nature of today's applications means that issues occurring in a single part of the end-to-end architecture could impact end-user performance, from the desktop/browser - Network - Web Servers - Application Servers - Database - Storage Systems

Storage performance has always played an important role in application performance, as quick access to data is at the heart of nearly every application. In a healthy environment, applications or databases request I/O from the storage system and receive a response to each request within an acceptable limit. It is the latency of this I/O request which is the fundemental key performance indicator of the storage system and therefore the one to focus on in any performance troubleshooting exercise.

Using a product such as DBTuna to monitor your NetApp storage arrays will allow quick detection of problems and offer all the metrics required to work out the underlying root cause of the problem. By having a complete history of NetApp storage performance in a simple to use rich interface the solution will allow you to work better as an organization and pro-actively tune storage performance before it has the chance to affect application end-users or processes.