Simplifying Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP monitoring using Amazon Managed Grafana

As a critical component of the complex IT Infrastructure spanning across on-premise data centers, multiple AWS regions and accounts, centralized monitoring of File systems is an essential component of organizations as they need to be able to ensure that systems are running smoothly, and that they can quickly remediate issues when they arise. You can simplify the monitoring of these file system operations leveraging the self-managed AWS services. By visualizing FSx for NetApp ONTAP metrics, you can monitor and right-size your file systems to optimize performance and costs.

In this post, we show how you can build an AWS Cloud native monitoring platform for FSx for NetApp ONTAP using the fully managed, highly available, scalable, and secure services Amazon Managed Grafana for better operational insights.

Solution Overview

Amazon Managed Grafana empowers you to create dashboards and alerts from multiple sources such as an Amazon Managed Prometheus workspace, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Timestream.

The following diagram demonstrates the solution architecture that leverages Amazon Managed Grafana to query and visualize the operational metrics from the Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP by using Amazon CloudWatch metrics.

Solution walkthrough

Using the following steps, we will create an Amazon Managed Grafana cluster that will source metrics data from Amazon CloudWatch FSx namespace and helps in monitoring all the Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP filesystem created in various regions in the AWS Account.

1. Enable AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On), if not enabled
2. Configure your Amazon Managed Grafana cluster and associated resources
3. Configure the data sources in Amazon Managed Grafana
4. Import the Amazon Managed Grafana Dashboard

Prerequisites

• AWS account with permissions to create resources in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

• IAM or federated user in your AWS account with the permissions to create and administer: AWS IAM role and policies, Amazon Managed Grafana

Enable IAM Identity Center

Before you deploy the CloudFormation stack for Amazon Managed Grafana, make sure to enable IAM Identity Center. If you don’t use IAM Identity Center, alternatively, you can set up user authentication via SAML. For more information, refer to Using SAML with your Amazon Managed Grafana workspace. If IAM Identity Center is currently enabled/configured in another region, you don’t need to enable in your current region.

Complete the following steps to enable IAM Identity Center:

1. On the IAM Identity Center console, under Enable IAM Identity Center, choose Enable.

2. Choose Create AWS organization.

Configure your Amazon Managed Grafana workspace and associated resources

Follow the steps in the article Configuring AWS Managed Grafana with CloudWatch Integration using CloudFormation to setup Amazon Managed Grafana. The CloudFormation templated is available in the GitHub location. On the stack’s Outputs tab, note the values for the GrafanaWorkspaceURL which is the Amazon Managed Grafana URL as shown below:

Create a user for Amazon Managed Grafana in IAM Identity Center

Complete the following steps to create a user for Amazon Managed Grafana:

1. On the IAM Identity Center console, choose Users in the navigation pane.
2. Choose Add user.
3. For Username, enter grafana-admin.
4. Enter and confirm your email address to receive a confirmation email.

5. Skip the optional steps, then choose Add user. A success message appears at the top of the console.
6. In the confirmation email, choose Accept invitation and set your user password.

7. On the Amazon Managed Grafana console, choose Workspaces in the navigation pane.
8. Open the workspace Amazon-Managed-Grafana.
9. Make a note of the Grafana workspace URL. You use this URL to log in to view your Grafana dashboards.
10. On the Authentication tab, choose Assign new user or group.

11. Select the user you created earlier and choose Assign users and groups.

12. On the Action menu, choose what kind of user to make it: admin, editor, or viewer. Note that your Grafana workspace needs at least one admin user.
13. Navigate to the Grafana URL you copied earlier in your browser.
14. Choose Sign in with AWS IAM Identity Center.

15. Log in with your IAM Identity Center credentials.

Configure the data sources in Amazon Managed Grafana

To configure your data sources, complete the following steps:

1. Log in to the Amazon Managed Grafana URL.
2. Choose AWS Data Services in the navigation pane, then choose Data Sources.
3. Then Click on Add New data source
4. For Services, choose CloudWatch.
5. Select the CloudWatch data source and choose Go to settings.

6. For Name, enter AmazonFSx-CloudWatch.
7. Choose the Region
8. Choose Save & Test

Sample FSxN Grafana Dashboard

To import your dashboard, complete the following steps:

1. Download the preconfigured Grafana dashboard from the GitHub location
2. In Amazon Managed Grafana, choose Dashboards then click on New
3. Choose Import.

4. Choose Upload JSON file.
5. Choose the dashboard you downloaded.
6. Choose Load.

7. The following screenshot shows your loaded dashboard.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP dashboards in Amazon Managed Grafana

You can now view your FSx ONTAP metrics dashboards on Amazon Managed Grafana configured using CloudWatch as the data source:

FSx for NetApp ONTAP Filesystem Summary

FSx for NetApp ONTAP Filesystem Storage metrics

FSx for NetApp ONTAP Filesystem Performance metrics

FSx ONTAP Filesystem Volumes Metrics

Cleanup

To remove the resources created by this stack, perform the following steps:

1. Remove the Grafana dashboards
2. Delete the CloudFormation stack you created for this solution

Troubleshooting

If you receive the error Your account is not a member of an organization. (Service: AWSSingleSignOn; Error Code: AccessDeniedException), verify that IAM Identity Center is enabled.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned how to monitor Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP data, and how to visualize the data in Grafana dashboards using provided preconfigured template. The sample Grafana dashboards are provided as open source—you can use them as a starting point for your own solution. To get hands-on experience with Amazon Managed Grafana, try AWS Workshop Studio.

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About the authors
	Jatinder Singh is a Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS who specializes in helping customers with their cloud migration and innovation endeavors. He brings his expertise and enthusiasm for technology to help clients efficiently scale their businesses so that they can focus on their core activities. Outside of work, he enjoys spending moments with his family and indulging in hobbies such as reading, culinary arts, and chess.
	Puneetha Kumara is a Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS, with over 15 years of industry experience, including roles in cloud architecture, systems engineering, and container orchestration.
	Manpreet , an experienced Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS, is dedicated to ensuring customer satisfaction. Her approach involves a deep understanding of customer objectives, aligning them with software capabilities, and effectively driving customer success. Outside of her professional endeavors, she enjoys traveling and spending quality time with her family.