Tools • Consulting • Strategies

NetApp Monitoring

This site is about NetApp-Monitoring. At the moment we focus on a suite of Nagios-Plugins for NetApp.

Nagios Plugins for NetApp

ADMIN-FRIENDLY PLUGINS FOR MONITORING YOUR FILERS

Uses the native NetApp-API instead of SNMP - simple and uniform authentication and data-retrieval (HTTP/XML)
Simple and uniform user-interface and output
Implementation- and maintenance-friendly, providing many overall-checks.
Lots of monitored values (usage, lag-time, snap reserve, SnapVaults, SnapMirrors, cluster, hardware, ops, transfer-rate, ...)
Fast reaction to feature requests

A detailed list and description of all plugins can be found in the spec-sheet Specifications Sheet Nagios-plugins for NetApp.

Overall-Checks

The concept of over-all-checks (one check for all instances f.e. aggregates, volumes, disks, ...) saves a lot of time during implementation and keeps the monitoring stable and current in the course of time. The plugins determine by themselves, if new instances have been added or removed.

For example the command check_netapp_disk -H toaster -u nagios%mypass checks the status of all existing Disks on the Netapp-Filer at run-time.

Clicking on disks, shows the details. Try it!

If the check finds a non-ok disk the nagios-gui changes to red as expected:

Now you can see the failed disk(s) along with the reasons for the failure. Try it!

All the Nagios-Plugins for NetApp

As of today (December 2009) we have developed 15 Nagios-plugins for monitoring many aspects of a NetApp-device. They can be divided onto the following groups:

Hardware: Broken disks, temperature, cooling-devices, power-supplies, nvram
Network: Stats per interface (ifnet): Bytes and packets read and sent, errors per second, multicasts, collissions, ...
Performance: Operations per second (HTTP, CIFS, ...), transfer-rate (network, disks, ...), utilization in % (processor, disk), performance per volume (latency, ops)
Snap: Available snap-size, lag-time and transfer-errors from SnapMirrors and SnapVaults, utilization of the snap-reserve
Storage: Available space for aggregates and volumes, quotas
Status: Global System-Status, cluster-status, status (online/offline) of the iSCSI-adapters, RAID-status of aggregates and volumes
Other: Other tools, modules and documentation

Versions and Testing

The Netapp-Nagios-Plugins (Check-scripts) have been tested against NetApp-Filers with DATA ONTAP 7.2 / 7.3.

Most of these Scripts are available as RC-versions now.

License / How to buy

Licenses are per Nagios-instance; the number of monitored NetApp-devices is not limited. Please contact me, if you need an offer or would like to distribute these plugins in your area.

Orders are accepted by email, fax or regular mail. Please include the name of the ordered plugins, and the total price in €. I will send you an official offer on request. Payment can be done by bank-transfer or credit-card.