We use the excellent Nagios network, host and service monitoring software at the office to track the status of our servers, routers, and network devices and connections. The program works great and we love it. However, the one area that we have wanted to track was the status of Dell PowerEdge servers, particularly those running Windows Server 2003. We’ve installed Dell’s OpenManage software on all the boxes and that works great, but we were not getting notified when something on the server failed (power supply, fan, or a disk in an array).

The status of server can be gotten through SNMP to the OpenManage so I knew that it could be done, I just didn’t want to have to reinvent the wheel. I did some searching, and I came across three plugins. The first is simply called check_dell.pl. It is checks the overall health of both the system and the array. If either is non-OK then it gives a warning. It is simple, quick, and effective, but I wanted additional reporting so that I know what was component was actually faulty.

The second plugin is called check_om.py and it checks the overall chassis status. If it is non-OK, it will then check other status indicators in order to create an error message that indicates where the problem lies. It has the ability to check for power supply, voltage, cooling device, temperature, memory, and intrusion issues. It works great, and we now us it!

Now I needed to find a way to report on the status of the drive arrays because the check_om.py doesn’t do that. I found a couple of plugins that would check the RAID controller locally or would do it for Linux servers. Then I finally found this check_win_perc plugin posted on a Dell mailing list site. It has a number of really good features, like telling which drive in the RAID array was having problems, but it also has some quirks. For one thing it stores baseline information in a temp that must be manually deleted. In order to work in our environment it needed some clean and modification.

I modified the plugin to better handle passing of SNMP community strings. As it was originally written it reported all the disks and their status, no matter to which array controller it might be attached. I modified the code so that you can select which of two controllers you want to monitor and report on only those disks. Because my coding skills are non-existent, it still has some unresolved quirks, like when it reports the number of Global Hot Spares it is still doing it across all controllers which is wrong.

My modified code is listed below. Please use at your own risk! If you make any modifications or enhancements please let me know.

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