About a month and a half ago we saw the iXsystems TrueCommand beta launch. Now, we have the full TrueCommand 1.0-Release. For those managing fleets of FreeNAS and TrueNAS storage appliances, this is going to be one of the more exciting releases of 2019. With TrueCommand, iXsystems is building a single pane of glass to monitor and manage deployments of multiple storage systems.
iXsystems TrueCommand 1.0-Release
The concept behind iXsystems TrueCommand is simple. The company behind FreeNAS and TrueNAS knows that users have multiple appliances deployed. Whether that is in corporate IT, as a SMB managed service provider, or even in home lab deployments. Traditionally, each of these systems would have to be managed separately. With TrueCommand, users can monitor and manage fleets of NAS units from a single interface. This includes being able to monitor the performance of FreeNAS and TrueNAS appliances on a single dashboard.
Here are some of the key features of TrueCommand:
ZFS Features Monitored
- Pools, VDevs, RAID-Z
- Cache (ARC, L2ARC, SLOG)
- Resilvering, Scrubbing
Reporting
- System info (name, IP, release, uptime, boot, device)
- CPU (number, utilization)
- Disks (status, throughput, IOPS, latency)
- Jails (granular monitoring per Jail/Plugin)
- Memory (activity, cache usage)
- Network (throughput, packets, status)
- Services (enabled, ID, status)
- Storage Status (pool, vdev, encryption)
- VMs (total, active)
Alerts
- In-app via web interface
- Email to users/teams
Role-based Access Control
- Single sign-on
- Define teams and departments
- Audit device history and changes
- Read-only views for users
Beyond this first release, one can see how having predictive failure tools across a number of NAS systems can be extremely useful. One can also see how this is a platform that has a number of logical extensions for features.
The TrueCommand V1.0-Release documentation is here if you want to learn more.
TrueCommand Licensing and Availability
You can get TrueCommand 1.0-Release today directly from the iXsystems website. License terms from the site states “TrueCommand is free to use to manage up to 50 drives. Enterprise licenses are available for larger deployments by contacting our team.”
A 50 drive deployment is not that much if you are using large 24-bay, 36-bay, and larger systems. It is quite a number of systems if you are using something like a FreeNAS Mini with four drive bays. We like the model of free for small deployments then licensing above that.
We love the fact that FreeNAS is “free” but at some point, someone has to pay for the development. Now if TrueCommand can just start to manage pfSense and Proxmox VE nodes this would be a complete open source game changer.
Expect more from STH on this.
This is a great opportunity for small MSPs that use Freenas as local/on-site backup cache. With 50 drives we can deploy 50 devices, or 25 with redundancy. And managing management would be so much easier than trying to deploy whole systems (with our remote tools) just to get a network attached drive for clients.