I have lived through this harrowing experience. Yes there were warning signs but as I was busy performing other tasks I did not see them. The moral of my story is to read your weekly message logs and have good back ups. I also file every weekly autosupport message.
We have tools within NetApp which run early each morning to analyze the autosupports we receive. I believe some types of problems (a disk, fan, or power supply failure) will already automatically trigger the creation of a support case and, where possible, notification to the customer so that corrective action can be taken if spares are on site. Other problems aren't automated yet. We're improving parts of the analysis at a rapid pace, so many errors which aren't yet caught will be dealt with in the near future.
Unfortunately, this only works if we get the autosupport in the first place. Apparently there are a number of customers who think we don't want to be bothered. We do! If your filer or NetCache doesn't list 'autosupport@netapp.com' in the 'autosupport.to' option, please add it if your policies allow this.
We understand that some customers can't take advantage of this due to security or confidentiality concerns. A longer-term goal is to wrap the analysis tools in a package that customers can run themselves.
-- Karl Swartz Network Appliance Engineering Work: kls@netapp.com http://www.netapp.com/ Home: kls@chicago.com http://www.chicago.com/~kls/