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8 Dell Compellent Storage Center Management Pack 3.0 for Microsoft SCOM 2012/R2 Best Practices
Rather than querying the Storage Center directly, Management Pack 3.0 uses Dell Compellent Enterprise
Manager as the data collector. The Management Pack uses a WMI Provider to query for Storage Center
component and performance data from the Enterprise Manager API web service. The WMI provider can
be configured to connect to one or more Dell Compellent API endpoints, and can query information from
multiple Storage Centers. By utilizing Enterprise Manager as the only data collector, the number of calls to
Storage Center that could affect performance is reduced significantly.
2.4 SCOM data collection overview
As shown in Table 2, SCOM uses three methods to gather and collect data:
Discoveries: Run every four hours and reports on new information found since the last run.
SCOM reports changes to the Storage Center, such as addition of a new controller of new volume
creation. When SCOM discovers a new controller, it initiates discoveries of the controller
configuration, such as volumes and replications.
Performance Collection Tasks: The default polling interval for these tasks is 15 minutes and
collects performance (I/O) data for defined objects in SCOM.
Event Collection Tasks: Run every 60 seconds and collect alerts.
Note: Management Pack 3.0 does not use WMI events to collect Storage Center alerts.
In addition to the SCOM defaults, Management Pack 3.0 monitors the status of discovered classes every
five minutes, Storage Center alerts are collected every five minutes, and Storage Center usage data
(available space, used space) is collected every 12 hours.
Table 2 Data collection methods
Data Collection Method
Default polling interval
Discoveries
Every four hours
Performance collection
Every 15 minutes
Event collection
Every 60 seconds
Storage Center usage
Every 12 hours
Note: Default polling intervals can be changed using Overrides in SCOM, or by changing associated
values in Enterprise Manager. Section 5 in this document provides information on Overrides.