Alibaba Cloud Lens for EBS Best Practices

With the rapid growth of customers' storage resources on the cloud, block storage products closely integrated with computing are increasingly attracting the attention of the operation and maintenance team. In the era of rapid changes in business requirements, more sophisticated monitoring and data analysis capabilities are needed to meet the changing scenarios and sudden business needs of storage resources.

Traditional system monitoring is often accompanied by two pain points.

First, the monitoring system only collects a single instance and cannot aggregate analysis.

Second, the monitoring accuracy is low. To provide monitoring data, more system resources are often consumed, which is not worth the loss.

Alibaba Cloud Lens for EBS is designed to solve such problems.

Alibaba Cloud Lens for EBS flexibly configures the monitoring scope through in-depth cooperation with Alibaba Cloud log service system. It is not only free from installing agents and consuming system resources, but also provides second level monitoring, so that customers can find system bottlenecks and analyze performance problems more accurately.

At the same time, Cloud Lens for EBS can also aggregate the resources used by customers, help customers quickly master resource consumption and data protection, improve the efficiency of resource use, and also timely discover the risk of data loss.

Scenario 1: Discover the performance bottleneck of the business system

Customers often fail to provide services normally during business emergencies and peak pressures, and existing monitoring systems cannot capture performance data across storage resources.

The second level monitoring provided by Cloud Lens for EBS makes it easier for customers to see the load changes of the system, so as to find performance bottlenecks faster.

Scenario 2: Quick overview of system operation status

While helping users collect monitoring data, Cloud Lens for EBS can also alert customers of performance bottlenecks in advance and provide rapid upgrading solutions based on Alibaba Cloud's data analysis capabilities and years of operational experience.

Scenario 3: AutoPL Cloud Disk Burst Performance Analysis

Cloud Lens for EBS provides customers using AutoPL cloud disks with the observation of performance burst data, helping them track the performance requirements and usage of cloud disks.

Demo Demo

First log in to the Alibaba Cloud official website and click the console. After entering the console page, enter ebs.console.aliyun.com in the browser bar to log in to the EBS console.

On the left side of the EBS console is the function menu bar.

Among them, resource management can view the statistics of all resources. Performance analysis is used to analyze the current cloud disk usage in different regions and available regions and the performance of AutoPL Burst cloud disks. Configuration management is used to enable or disable Cloud Lens for EBS to collect customer data. Risk management is used to analyze the risk status of different cloud disks of customers.

The above figure is the resource management page, showing the total number, total capacity, region, availability zone and other information of cloud disks. Through the resource overview, you can master the use of the overall cloud disk.

Performance analysis includes AutoPL Burst analysis and TOP performance analysis.

AutoPL Burst analysis is mainly used to help customers understand when and when performance bursts occurred in AutoPL cloud disks and the number of bursts.

For example, in the above figure, 956470 bursts occurred on a cloud disk at 12:00 on September 26, 2022, that is, the number of IO bursts. Click the cloud disk ID, and you can see from the pop-up window that business emergencies occurred at 12:25 and 12:29.

TOP performance analysis is mainly used to help customers understand the overall performance and make more detailed second level analysis of different cloud disk performance. For example, if you select this week and click Query, you can view the throughput and iops of all cloud disks in this week, as well as the TOP values of different write and read throughput databases. Click the cloud disk ID to view the complete trend and attributes of the cloud disk.

Configuration management is mainly responsible for managing which cloud disks are provided to customers for data collection in Cloud Lens for EBS. The cloud disk data can be analyzed and collected by closing or opening operations, or the collected data can be thrown into the log service for a longer time to facilitate subsequent data analysis by customers.

Risk management includes performance and data protection.

The performance side provides analysis of cloud disk types, cloud disk IDs, and time in different regions to filter cloud disks with performance risks in the account.

The online business will be affected when the cloud disk reaches the performance and goes online. Therefore, we also provide different functions such as online orchestration or capacity expansion to improve the cloud disk performance, so as to meet the business needs.

On the data protection side, we help customers find data cloud disks without snapshot protection by region, cloud disk type, cloud disk ID, and time.

Click Resource Overview - Alarm Center, and the customized alarm function can help customers customize alarm events to solve the alarm of cloud disk exceeding the performance online.

Click the Add button to configure alarms, and select relevant parameters, such as alarm cycle and range, alarm threshold and alarm sending strategy, to help better manage alarm events.

At the same time, Alibaba Cloud Les for EBS has the ability to deliver to SLS for more data analysis. The overview page provides data access collection, which can be processed in the access management interface. Click Open or Close to select the time and region to save and post to the user's SLS directory.