topic Re: monitoring disk space in Operating System - HP-UX

monitoring disk space

Niraj_1 — Tue, 04 May 2004 06:12:36 GMT

Hi,

Is there a framework/tool which can be readily used to monitor disk space and send a SNMP trap.

Appreciate any architectural solutions/pointers.

br,
Niraj.

Re: monitoring disk space

Pete Randall — Tue, 04 May 2004 06:21:43 GMT

I use the simple approach:

I have a cron job that emails the output of the bdf command to me every morning.

Pete

Re: monitoring disk space

Geoff Wild — Tue, 04 May 2004 07:31:22 GMT

Have a look at Big Brother:

http://bb4.com/

Big Brother is designed to let anyone see how their network is doing in near real-time, from any web browser, anywhere.

Big Brother displays status information as web pages or WML pages for WAP-enabled devices.

These web pages have the systems monitored down the left hand side of the page, the tests for each system across the top of the page.

This results in a matrix of color coded dots on screen. Green is Good, Red is Bad. In addition, the background color of the status pages is always the color of the most serious condition of any element being monitored at that time.

Big Brother uses a client-server architecture combined with methods which both push and pull data. Network testing is done by polling all monitored services from a single machine, and reporting these results to a central location (the BBDISPLAY). If you want local system information, you can install a BB client on the local machine, which will send CPU, process, disk space, and logfile status reports in periodically. Each report is timestamped with an expiration date (like milk). This lets us know when a report is no longer valid, which is usually an indication of a more serious problem.

Big Brother sends all status reports from client to server over port 1984. What other port would Big Brother use? The IANA has assigned Big Brother this port, and the BB protocol itself is open. Limited support for SNMP trap handling is supported using third-party plugins.

Big Brother includes support for testing ftp, http, https, smtp, pop3, dns, telnet, imap, nntp, and ssh servers. Support for additional tests is easily added.

If you choose to install a BB client on a local machine, it will monitor disk space, CPU usage, messages, and can check that important processes are up and running

Big Brother is very flexible. Warning and alarm levels are all easily redefinable. The Web Display can be easily customized. We have hooks into other products, like MRTG for bandwidth monitoring. Since you have the source code, you can easily figure out what Big Brother is doing, and change it to suit your needs.

Of course HP's OVO works as well.

Rgds...Geoff

Re: monitoring disk space

Fred Martin_1 — Wed, 05 May 2004 08:35:41 GMT

My database application allows users to run reports to files; by default they land in /var/tmp so I am always at risk of crashing the system, if a user runs a wide-open report ("show me every sales order ever entered since the dawn of time, include line item details").

So I also have a root cron look at bdf command but I do it every half-hour. The script does a bdf, and if any critical file system is over 85% it send me a page and an email with the bdf output if it can.

The percentage depends on your need - how full is the system normally, and what do you consider "too high".

Re: monitoring disk space

sam_111 — Wed, 05 May 2004 09:16:08 GMT

hi Niraj,

You can Try using OPENVIEW Tools from HP. (NNM and OVO).
www.openview.hp.com

If you are looking for free tools. Nagios and Big Brother are the best.

Check the link of Nagios. http://www.nagios.org/

regards,
sam

Re: monitoring disk space

sam_111 — Thu, 06 May 2004 09:02:10 GMT

hi niraj,

Also check out this tool Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG)

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/

regards,

sam

Re: monitoring disk space

Hazem Mahmoud_3 — Thu, 06 May 2004 09:15:07 GMT

We also use bdf to monitor on a daily basis. I also have a regular disk cleaning script that runs twice a month. Whenever I realize something else needs to be cleaned up on a regular basis, I throw it in that script.
I also use Lund Performance Solutions (www.lund.com) to monitor trends in disk space utilization (as well as other system performance parameters).

-Hazem

Re: monitoring disk space

Ernesto Cappello — Thu, 06 May 2004 09:55:33 GMT

I use this shell script and you can insert in your crontab.

#!/bin/sh
THRESHHOLD="7[0-9]%"
THRESHHOLD1="8[0-9]%"
THRESHHOLD2="9[0-9]%"
THRESHHOLD3="100%"

# BDF ON SERVER_NAME
echo "#######################" > bdf_on_servers.txt
echo "# BDF ON SERVER_NAME#" >> bdf_on_servers.txt
echo "#######################" >> bdf_on_servers.txt
echo "\n" >> bdf_on_servers.txt
echo "Filesystem kbytes used avail %used Mounted on \n" >> bdf_on_servers.txt
bdf -l | grep -e $THRESHHOLD -e $THRESHHOLD1 -e $THRESHHOLD2 -e $THRESHHOLD3 >> bdf_on_servers.txt

ux2dos bdf_on_servers.txt | mailx -s "BDF on UNIX SERVERS" name.surname@site.it

where name.surname@site.it is your email address.
Regards.
Ernesto.