It seems to me that a low/no cost alternative should be avalible. Sure it won't be as nice and robust, but work none the less. If I had the (read: ANY) money I'd consider a propritary tool, but the ammount of data suppied from the toaster is so profound that it's hardly a task to simply write your own. What, if anything, does the proprietary tool buy me anyway? Possibly the ability to "graphically manage your raid groups and volume. Make changes with just a click!" (I can see the ex-cheerleader spokeswoman now). However, OnTap is cozie enough for me, so I opt to leave these forms of GUI management for thoughs who need it.

BTW, some comments were made about BB being a possibile solution, however I'm avoiding it because it is, IMHO, a cludgey tool and has the worlds most pathetic CGI interface ever. Even though these issues could actually be hammered out by a couple tactful hacks, I think there are enough people who currently enjoy BB that I'd be forced to fork the code base, and I don't recall them being under GPL. In any case, BB is out as a possiblity too, despite the fact that it's pretty close to what I need.

Ben Rockwood

-----Original Message----- From: Chris Blackmor [mailto:chris.blackmor@amd.com] Sent: Sat 4/13/2002 2:24 PM To: Oye Akintan Cc: Ben Rockwood; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Monitoring Tools for Failure Detection Costly yes but a really nice tool for doing just what you are asking. C-

On Sat, Apr 13, 2002 at 01:25:05PM -0400, Oye Akintan wrote:

If you have the money to spend, check out Data fabric manager from Netapp. It's costly though

Oye ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ben Rockwood" BRockwood@homestead-inc.com To: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2002 4:33 AM Subject: Monitoring Tools for Failure Detection

...

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