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share you disk space alert settings?

For reasons I can't remember anymore I deleted our basic alerts and recreated them as advanced alerts. However it doesn't look like our disk space alerts are working. meaning we're not getting email alerts like the other advanced alerts we've created.

can someone share the settings they have on each tab that makes it email you at various intervals of disk space left. we want alerts based on less than 10% or less than 30GB and then again at less than 1GB and we want it to email us when it gets above those thresholds.

screenshots would work too instead of typing everything.

Thanks!

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DirtySouth

I have created a custom property for Volumes called "DiskSpace_1GB". I then enable this property for the volumes I want to be alerted on.

Advanced Alert Trigger:

Trigger Alert when all the following apply

DiskSpace_1GB is equal to Yes

Volume Space Avaialble is less than or equal to 1073741824

The alert is set to log an event and send an email. The email basically states the server name, IP Address and location. It then shows the "VolumeSpaceAvailable" and a link to the Orion volume graph. Heres an example:

Server: ${NodeName}
IP: ${Node.IP_Address}
Volume: ${SQL:Select Substring ('${Caption}',1,3) AS Caption}
Space Available: ${SQL:Select CAST( ROUND (${VolumeSpaceAvailable}/1048576, 0) AS Decimal(18,0)) AS Gigabytes} MB
Volume Graph: ${VolumeDetailsURL}

lhorstma

I created different alerts for each alert level rather than trying to create one alert for multiple levels. We also separated them by the size of the disk, so a drive that's 1 TB would alert at 50GB, 25GB, then 3GB left, but a 500GB drive would alert at 20GB, 10GB, and 3GB. All in all we have a ton of alerts set up and it's pretty ugly to look at, but it works ok.

Within the alert it basically looks like:

Trigger when all

Trigger when Any

Nodename starts with ‘aaa’

Nodename starts with ‘bbb’

Trigger when none

Trigger when Any

Ip address starts with ‘192.168.0’

Ip address starts with ‘192.168.5’

Volume Size greater than 300 GB

Volume Size is less than 600 GB

Volume Space available less than 20 GB

Volume Type equal to Fixed Disk

ExtraJunk equal True

The sizes I actually used the bytes, so 322122547200 instead of 300 GB. As for the other tabs there's not much. Reset condition is just when no longer true. I don't use the alert suppression tab since I just suppress everything I want to within the trigger condition itself. Time of day is left as default. Trigger action is just a basic email alert. No reset actions.

cgregors

Chris Siebenmann wrote an interesting blog article about alerting based on percentages.

The blog is here: http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/NoAlertOnPercentages?showcomments#comments

Here's the body:

Please don't alert based on percentages

One of the classic mistakes made by monitoring and alerting systems is to alert based on percentages; if something registers at 90% or 95% or whatever, it raises various sorts of alerts. This is a terrible mistake.

(The people who write these monitoring systems love percentage based alerts because they're so easy to do, which in my cynical view is why lots of monitoring systems ship with them.)

The easiest way to see the problem of percentage based alerts is to consider disk space monitoring. Suppose the system alerts based on a filesystem reaching 95% full. Does this give you useful information?

Well, no. First, it doesn't tell you how much disk space is left. 95% full on a 50 GByte filesystem is very much different than 95% full on a 1.5 TByte filesystem; in fact, at 95% used the 1.5 TB filesystem has more free space than the entire 50 GByte filesystem ever had. Filesystem space is one of those cases where you usually care more about absolute numbers than about percentages.

Second, even simple space used doesn't actually tell you if you should panic. What generally matters is not that some quantity has reached an arbitrary value, what matters is whether or not you are going to run out of capacity at some point in the near future. To have some idea of that, you need to know not just the current capacity left but how fast capacity has been consumed. 50 Gbytes free at a space growth rate of 256 Mbytes a day is very different from 50 Gbytes free at a space growth rate of 10 Gbytes a day; you ignore the former (unless you have a very long lead time on getting space) but you really want to pay attention to the latter because you only have a few days left to get more space.

(Similarly you care both about the long term trend rate and any short term deviations from it because both of them can cause you problems.)

Similar issues apply to pretty much any other metric you may be monitoring. Doing useful alerts about capacity problems is just not amenable to simple percentage based solutions, because such solutions are not answering a useful question. If you want to make useful alerts, they should generally at least be based on intelligently chosen absolute numbers.