A little help with monitoring directories

I would like to use the directory size monitoring feature to monitor directories, across several computers. The problem I'm having is that these directories are unlikely to be the same path/location on each computer, indeed across even a small sample of 5 computers, they are all on different drives.

When I use the file size template and assign a directory size monitor to a single directory its fine (eg <c:\path\logs>). When I add another path for another computer (eg <d:\a different path\logs>) then obviously I start to get errors, because Computer 1 has <C:\path\logs>, but no <D:\other path\logs>, and so on with multiple drive letters.

I'd like to avoid the situation where I'm adding a new template for every single drive combination, because I want to be monitoring 3 or 4 folders per computer, and they can all be on different drives.

Can anyone point me in the right direction, or suggest how I might go about monitoring these directories for growth? The directory names will always be the same, but the paths will always be different.

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samirb

Hello, I have done something like this. We are monitoring log files for one application however that app is installed differently on 20+ servers, therefore the logs are in a different location. What I did was get all the paths and add them to the main template. Apply that template to all servers. Then go into each template for each node and disable the components for that node only. Dont worry, it wont modify the master template. You can also delete the invalid path components from the nodes by going to Manage Assigned Component Monitors. Hope that helps.

mrxinu

This sounds like something that could be sorted out with a little PowerShell scripting. If you know what the names of the folders are going to be, they could be searched out with Get-ChildItem and the -Recurse option. Once the targets were found, the tests could be done and then reported back to SAM. One template that's dynamic that could accept the ${IP} of the node it's been applied to and work from there. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, let me know and I can help you sort through it.

FormerMember

Hi Steven,

This sounds like an ideal solution; I'm completely new to SolarWinds and Powershell, any advice/help you can offer would be very much appreciated, thanks!

mrxinu

Do you happen to have a list of all the possible path configurations?

FormerMember

Hi Steven, its difficult to provide a complete list of path configurations, because they can be on any windows drive essentially.

I want to monitor a few log directory sizes, as if they bloat it often indicates a problem. These directories can be on whatever drive a customer chooses, so its difficult to provide anything concrete. And again to add more complexity, they will be of different sizes, so a universal rule for '\logs\' is probably not going to work!

All the directories are called '\logs\', and have a common tree, with different directories immediately prior, if that makes sense, eg:

:\program files\autonomy\indexer\worksite connector\logs

:\program files\autonomy\indexer\worksite synctool\logs

Is that going to make it trickier?

mrxinu

Having one part of the path be dynamic isn't an issue but blindly searching for directories named "logs" (too generic) would be messy if there were other log directories that didn't have the things we were looking for. Not impossible, mind you, we could always peek into each log directory we find to make sure it has things we expect in it before we start counting files, but it would be easier if we could lock it down to: "{search all drives}:\program files\autonomy\indexer\{search all directories at this position}\logs". Is that reasonable?

mrxinu

As for the different thresholds, if you're given 10 logs directories, how do you determine which are too big? Is there a maximum reasonable size per directory or customer?

P.S. I realize all the questions seem laborious but I promise that once they're all nailed down codifying the logic goes quickly.

FormerMember

That search path seems pretty reasonable to me.

FormerMember

I'm really not too sure about this point. Some log directories can grow to a hundred MB or more, and some don't ever go over 50 (unless there is a problem).

mrxinu

Okay, let me hack up something that will get the sizes of those directories (wherever they may be hiding) and then we can figure out how to handle the thresholds. There's an option in SAM that will let you treat statistics as differences, but that would only tell you if the consumption went up very quickly, not that it had reached an unreasonable level. If you're looking at a directory and it's at 350 MB, how do you know that's too big? Do you have a document somewhere that matches up the paths with the maximum reasonable size?

mrxinu

We still need to work out the thresholds, but here we go. It works against all drives on the system. It assumes they're local systems at the moment, so we'd have to tweak it to hit remote systems. Let me know about the questions above and we'll get it nailed down.

# program: find-and-check-logdir-size.ps1

# max acceptable size in megabytes

$maxMBs = 10

# build the parts of the logfile path, for example:

# {all_drive}:\users\mrxinu\dropbox\test\{any_dir_here}\logs

# would take the values:

# $pathRoot = 'users\mrxinu\dropbox\test'

# $logDirName = 'logs'

# now, you try it...

$pathRoot = 'users\mrxinu\dropbox\test' # set this to the first part of the path

$logDirName = 'logs' # set this to the name of the logfile directory

# iterate over all the file system drive letters

Get-PSDrive -PSProvider FileSystem | % {

# build the path with the configuration above

$path = '{0}:\{1}\*\{2}\*' -f ($_.Name, $pathRoot, $logDirName)

# make sure we have a valid path

If ((Test-Path $path) -eq $true) { # we have a good path, keep going

$directorySize = (Get-ChildItem -Path $path | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum).Sum

# convert bytes to MBs

$directorySizeInMBs = [System.Math]::Round($directorySize / 1024 / 1024, 2)

# report the statistic either way

Write-Host -Object ('Statistic: {0}' -f $directorySizeInMBs)

# test the size of the directory against our max (above)

If ($directorySizeInMBs -gt $maxMBs) { # over our limit

Write-Host 'Message: Directory over threshold: {0}/{1}'

Exit(1) # set the component to DOWN

}

Else { # under our limit

Write-Host 'Message: Directory under threshold.'

Exit(0) # set the component to UP

}