DX Unified Infrastructure Management

Is anyone else using Nimbus to do any monitoring of a Dell EqualLogic SANs?

We would like to be able to pull volume and health information from the SAN driectly.

I've seen a couple other threads about SAN monitoring, so I have a few ideas to try (Writing a small perl script to get the information from the command line of the SAN.  Trying to figure out the OIDs and using the SNMPGet probe.)

I am hoping someone has tackled some of this already and can point mein the right direction.

Thanks!

-Mark

Hi Mark.

Don't know of any IRL examples, but it certainly seems do-able.

Without an EQL to run snmpget tests against I've only got the MIB info to work with but between gets and traps there is a wealth of information to be had from the DISK, BALANCER, RAID, STORAGEPOOL and VOLUME MIBs among others.

The MEMBER MIB contains pretty much all of the trap types for the EQL system (Environment, RAID Status, Battery Fan etc.) and the only trap available for disks is StatusChange, so a get request would alow you to be far more specific when looking for online, offline, failed unsupported etc.

I have an ongoing (at the time of this post) Client requirement to monitor their Dell Equallogic SAN. I have not been able to provide a solution using SNMPGET, SNMPTD, SYSLOGGTW or LOGMON probes and could really use some assistance.

I need to be able to alarm on the failure of any of the following SAN components: Disk Drive, Network, SAN Controller, Power supply and Overall SAN System Unavailable.

Short story long… Originally the request was for performance and alarming. After days of scouring through the 10800 OIDs provided by the Equallogic MIBs I could not build an adequate solution. After turning to Dell support I discovered that the Client was already using Dell’s SAN Headquarters for provisioning. I had burnt up hours of Professional Services time trying to recreate the wheel and my tasks were diverted to alarming for component unavailability and/or hardware failure.
I discovered I had issues with loading the Equallogic MIBs that apparently limited me to only the aforementioned 10800 OIDs and none of the 22 Traps in SNMPTD were of any use. After hours of tech support time determining that there could be an issue with one of the MIBs and possibly the load order, I turned to using SYSLOGGTW and LOGMON to try and alert off of the Syslog messages from the controller on the PS-100E. I have since spent hours trying to find any examples or documentation that describes the possible Syslog messages relating to hardware failure. I have successfully set things up to the point where I can capture the Syslog output from the SAN and generate alerts from the only informational message currently being produced. I can generate and alert off of Syslog messages generated from Kiwi’s SyslogGen application. But I have no way to generate a properly formatted message directly from the SAN so I am stuck. I have spent many hours with Dell’s support, support sites, communities and white papers looking for any documentation on the structure or syntax of their Syslog messages from which I can create relational expressions in LOGMON to convert them to readable alarms.