The Troubleshoot a Datastore dashboard allows you to identify storage issues and act on them.

You can use the search option to identify a datastore that has an issue or you can identify a datastore that has high latency as seen in red on the heat map. You can also sort all the datastores with active alerts and troubleshoot the datastore with known issues.

You can select a datastore to see its current capacity and utilization with the number of VMs served by that datastore. The metric charts help you view historical trends of key storage metrics such as latency, outstanding IOs, and throughput.

The dashboard also lists the VMs served by the selected datastore and helps you analyze the utilization and performance trends of those VMs. You can migrate the VMs to other datastores to even out the IO load.

You can use the dashboard widgets in several ways.

  • Search for a datastore: Use this widget to select the datastore for which you want to view performance details. You can use the filter to narrow your list based on several parameters. After you identify the datastore you want to view, select it. The dashboard is automatically populated with the relevant data.
  • Are there active alerts on your datastore: Use this widget to view only the critical alerts.
  • Are the relatives healthy?: Use this widget to view the hierarchy of the objects related to the datastore and if any of the objects are impacted.
  • Is your datastore experiencing high latency? and Any outstanding disk I/Os?: Use these widgets to view those datastores with high latency and outstanding disk I/O trends. Ideally, your datastores must not have outstanding disk I/O.
  • How many IOPS is your datastore serving and Latency trend for the I/Os done by the VM: Use these widgets to view the current IOPS and latency of the VMs in the selected datastore.
  • Use the other widgets in the dashboard to view trends for the selected datastore regarding disk latency, IOPS, and throughput, VMs served by the datastore and I/O pattern of the selected VM.