Hello Masters of Toast,
I'm looking for some input and suggestions on something I'm preparing to take up, any suggestions or comments are appreciated...
There are several tools avalible (namely MRTG and Cricket) for monitoring Filers (and I suppose NetCache's too), but I've not found these tools adiquate. The problem is that these tools are best at graphing statical information over a period of time, which is important to most of you for reporting and monitoring the performance of your Filers. However, in my case, I'm not really interested in the performance of the filers. What I am interested in is general health and failure detection. At one point the filers were monitored by logging in each day and manually checking via sysconfig -r, then (unwilling to log into every filer for quick checks) I decided to implement a small tool which could via SNMP do basic checking and reporting of filers basic vitals via a single command. I'm now becoming unsatisfied with this tool, and preparing to build a much more complex tool that can do more than simply look for failures in componants, but also do analysis on networking and fibre channel statistics, automated failure detection to a paging system, as well as offer both CLI and CGI interfaces. A later version would probly grow to include trapping.
So the question is this. Am I wasting my time? Is there already a sutable tool to do this? I understand that NetApp has a GUI tool that can do almost anything you want with the filers via SNMP, but I'm uninterested in this type of tool. Whats important to me is getting a complete picture of a filers (or set of filers) health at a glance by issuing a single command or by executing a single CGI script. Would this tool be useful or of any interest to others?
Thank You.
Ben Rockwood brockwood@homestead-inc.com