Managing Dashboard

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Last updated: Apr 13, 2023 by Sean HastertVersion comment
3 min read

The SoftNAS Dashboard provides a quick summary of the key statistics and performance indicators.

Covered in this document:

1. CPU Utilization

The CPU Utilization chart displays the real-time CPU usage information. You can use this chart to determine how much the storage processing load is impacting CPU.

If you see an average CPU utilization that is above 60%, consider adding more CPU capacity to improve the performance and response time. Also, if CPU load gets too high, then the SoftNAS StorageCenter response times may become unacceptably slow.

High CPU utilization may be caused by specifying compression on volumes with high I/O workloads or other heavy I/O workloads. Increasing the number of vCPU (virtual CPU's) assigned to the SoftNAS VM usually resolves CPU workload issues.

2. I/O Throughput

The I/O Throughput chart displays the network and disk I/O throughput statistics in MB/sec over time.

You can use this chart to observe the system input/output levels and throughput of the network and disk subsystems.

  • To highlight a particular chart line (e.g., Network Reads), hover the mouse over the legend label text Network Reads.|

  • The selected chart line will be highlighted and you can easily view its trends.

  • To disable a particular chart line, click on the legend label text. The corresponding chart line will be disappeared.

  • To enable or restore it back, click on the legend label text again. 
If you observe a high amount of network I/O and a relatively low amount of disk I/O, that usually means most of the I/O workload is being cached in memory; i.e., the system's cache memory is working well, minimizing the amount of disk I/O required for commonly accessed data.

3. Storage

The Storage pie chart shows the overall Used vs. Free space of all the Storage Pools.

4. Cache Memory

The Cache Memory pie chart shows how much of main memory is allocated to cache, the amount of cache that's unused (free), and the amount that is used (contains active data available for fast read operations).  

5. Cache Performance

The Cache Performance chart shows the number of read operations being serviced from cache memory (instead of being read from disk). In many applications, after applications have been running for a time, the majority of reads will be serviced from cache memory instead of requiring disk read operations.