From owner-toasters@mathworks.com Thu Apr 25 18:03 MDT 2002

Hello Mighty Toasters,

As some may have noticed recently, I've become very interested in monitoring tool development for the filers. I've recently had a minor breakthrough using SNMP tables and mutli-dimensional arrays in PERL. This is particularly interesting because it gives me the ability to develope tools that can run sorts on the raid tables, disk usage tables, and more.

Here's the problem, most of the tools I'm building now have little to no value. They are amusing and fun to write, but especially if you use FilerView these tools are useless. While this is a credit to NetApp, I'm curious if there are any tools people would like to see.

What types of monitoring tools would you guys like to see? Performance tools are pretty well taken care of with MRTG and Cricket, though it would be fairly simple to use an snmp polling loop to drop files into either a MySQL/PostGreSQL backend or maybe just a BerkleyDB and then run GNUplot on 'em for a more simplified Cricket replacement, but since Cricket is so trusted it's unlikely for any of my tools be replace it.

In essence, I've solved the problems I need to solve and now what to find some way to use all the kool tricks I've learned in the proccess. Ideas?

If nothing else, I'm hoping to write an article soon about how to easily develop your own in-house tools for the Filers, which is probly the most useful thing I could do.

Thanx in advance.

Ben Rockwood

It's not very high-tech, but I think syslog analysis from any machines (including filers) can by QUITE helpful.

Simply centrally logging events, using a log-parsing tool such as Swatch, and then appplying appropriate filtering rules over time results in a pretty decent signal-noise ratio of "significant" events that merit watching.

You still need some other stuff (ex: simple remote monitoring via ping/CIFS/NFS functionality), and doesn't help you too much in the performance area, but syslog is good stuff IMHO. alek

P.S. Here's a presentation on using Swatch: http://www.komar.org/ -> Misc. Tech Stuff -> Swatch