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Best practice for Win LogicalDisk Free Megabytes

Coming from the IBM Tivoli Monitoring world to SolarWinds
APM, I’m looking for best practice info on setting up a monitor to alert on low
available free megabytes. In the ITM
world, it was pretty much as simple as setting up a monitor to watch all logical
disks, excluding “_Total” and giving it thresholds. Across all Win servers it would alert if
such a case existed and report back the offending drive letter/server and
current free space.

So far, in SolarWinds APM, it looks as though I have to
specify a single instance(C:,

, etc…) within the component monitor. When I test, it reports a failure if the
drive letter does not exist. Does this
mean I would have to create a template that has C: &

comp monitors and
apply it to all servers that have C: &

drives, and a different template
for servers that have a C:,

, & L: drive?

That would seem an administrative nightmare.

I’ve seen a few examples of scripted solutions. I could script something that loops through
all logical disks that the script discovers when running against a server and
evaluate free megabytes on each. But
wouldn’t that limit me to a generic ‘alert’, utilizing the two thresholds?
(basically not clearly identifying the specific drive letter within the alert?)

Hope I haven’t confused anyone with this request. Again.. just looking to not spend cycles
re-inventing the wheel and looking for the simplest, most effective solution.

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byrona

Just thinking off the cuff here...

If you also have Orion NPM, use SNMP and advanced alerts for this, it will make your life much easier.

If you are using Orion APM and performance counters, I would create a single template with all of the drives that you would potentially use. Then as you apply the template to specific systems, just delete the components that don't apply.

Hope this helps!

smargh

For NPM-based SNMP volume monitoring, be aware that Orion will stop monitoring volumes if, for example, the Windows volume name changes, i.e. "Local Disk" C: drive to "Windows", or if a Windows cluster flips over to the hot standby, or if you replace one hard drive with another but keep the same drive letter.

To account for this, you will need an alert to tell you when a volume becomes "unknown", then you need to manually delete it, list resources, add it, then re-apply any custom properties. You will lose previous graphs for the affected volume(s).

When I first started with Orion I raised this as a bug, but they said it was a feature and cannot be worked around. I actually looked at the SNMP packets it was getting back from servers and all volumes are included regardless of what Orion is monitoring, but Orion ignores renamed volumes

Perhaps it's not as simple as that, but I've come to accept this as a bug that will never be fixed