Disk Fragmentation

stevecera

Does anyone know if there is a way for SolarWinds to monitor logical volume fragmentation?  We currently utilize a product called Diskkeeper on most of our servers to automatically defrag their drives, but I want SolarWinds to be able to monitor file fragmentation and alert me if a volume becomes to fragmented.  Previously we were using MOM2005 which had the ability to alert us on file fragment issues.

Thank you in advance.

RogerWong

Hi, Steve. Orion APM 3.0 doesn't have a built-in Windows disk fragmentation component monitor at this time, but you can still get some fragmentation related information.

1. You can write a script that calls the DefragAnalysis method of the Win32_Volume class, and send one of the a defrag performance counters to Orion APM as a statistic. You could probably adopt the following script to scan just the C: volume and to output just the AverageFragmentsPerFile as a statistic.  Keep in mind that every time you run this script, Windows makes that computer run a full defrag analysis of the volume, so the results won't be instantaneous.

http://snipplr.com/view.php?codeview&id=13583

2. When a volume becomes fragmented, the I/O requests get split into multiple parts. Windows counts each of these splits, and if you see a lot of them it indicates disk fragmentation.  The exact number is something you'll have to establish yourself, but I Google searched and one fellow said he was using 250 per second as his limit.

Example Performance Counter monitor to read C: volume split IO counter

Category: Win32_PerfFormattedData_PerfDisk_LogicalDisk

Counter: SplitIOPerSec

Instance: C:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394261(VS.85).aspx