Physical Disk Reporting

D'Agger

Hi All,

I've had threads regarding network reporting, Spiceworks vs. Lansweeper etc. over the past while.

I've finally decided to push forwards with Lansweeper, however, we've recently come across a problem whereby my boss had to visit a remote site and discovered that one of the disks on its RAID5 configuration had failed. So the server was still going, but it had an error message on its screen reporting a drive had failed.

I checked the server in question on Lansweeper and it's showing up all logical drives fine, it's not showing anything in the event viewer about the disks etc. - it's as though nothing has gone wrong with the server. So only that somebody was physically there to see the disk had failed we would not have known.

The disk could be okay and could just need a repair via diskpart, however I'm wondering whether or not I can setup email reporting on physical disks that have failed or are reporting as failed. So that I can be made aware of something like this occurring again?

Would appreciate any advice on where to go with this.

wexie

....As far as the OS was concerned there was nothing wrong with the 'logical' disk as (assuming it was hardware RAID5) the hardware would have been transparent to the OS. No events would have been generated as the RAID controller has done what it's supposed to do. All the OS sees is a logical disk, the fact that this logical disk sits on multiple physical disks is irrelevant to it.

You'd need some form of software that will communicate directly with the hardware controller with regards status.

Most vendors will have some form of software (freely) available that will / can send SNMP alerts or emails, or perhaps tie in with something like you're using.

However monitoring the logical disks will tell you nothing until it's already too late.

Maybe post some more info regarding the underlying hardware and people will be able to give better info.

D'Agger

wexie wrote: »

....As far as the OS was concerned there was nothing wrong with the 'logical' disk as (assuming it was hardware RAID5) the hardware would have been transparent to the OS. No events would have been generated as the RAID controller has done what it's supposed to do. All the OS sees is a logical disk, the fact that this logical disk sits on multiple physical disks is irrelevant to it.

You'd need some form of software that will communicate directly with the hardware controller with regards status.

Most vendors will have some form of software (freely) available that will / can send SNMP alerts or emails, or perhaps tie in with something like you're using.

However monitoring the logical disks will tell you nothing until it's already too late.

Maybe post some more info regarding the underlying hardware and people will be able to give better info.

Perfect, I figured that was the case as Lansweeper would have definintely reported an error if it wasn't simply reporting from the OS.

It's a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with Server 2003 on it - it's not a critical server, it's being used on our smallest site.

There is Dell Open Manage Software on the device which I'm fairly certain might fit the bill I've just never come across it or used it before so will need to make time and look into that.

Thanks again for the reply though, glad to have it confirmed that a Network Monitoring device won't report on it!

wexie

Openmanage will definitely be able to report on it and, while I'm not really familiar with Lansweeper, Openmanage should go a long way to doing what lansweeper does.

D'Agger

wexie wrote: »

Openmanage will definitely be able to report on it and, while I'm not really familiar with Lansweeper, Openmanage should go a long way to doing what lansweeper does.

Lovely, will look into implementing that so - thanks again for the responses