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Volume Monitoring Thresholds

Best Practices for Volume Monitoring Thresholds

Through my experience as a monitoring administrator, I have developed some best practices for monitoring volumes. These include:

  1. Volume thresholds should include BOTH percent usage and bytes usage thresholds. This will cover both your large and small volumes. An example would be 2gb free AND 5% free. In this example small volumes will alert at 5% and large volumes will alert at 2gb.
  2. Define a global default, but also allow for deviation from the default for individual volumes when necessary.
  3. Show current usage AND threshold for the specific volume in alerts.

In Orion NPM, it is very easy to implement these standards. Lets jump in.

1. First, lets setup the custom property fields to store our thresholds.

  •     Open SolarWinds Custom Property Editor and select Volumes.
    • Click Add
    • Check the Show Advanced Properties checkbox
    • Scroll down and check these 4 Properties:
      • DiskUsage_Marker (This will be your bytes threshold)
      • DiskUsage_Annotation (This will be text for the threshold marker on the graph. EG "Bytes Usage Threshold")
      • PercentDisk_Marker (This will be your % threshold)
      • PercentDisk_Annotation (This will be text for the threshold marker on the graph. EG "% Usage Threshold")

               I use the Predefined Properties as they will add the thresholds as a line on your Volume graphs. It's a great way to visually see how close your volume is to the threshold.

    • (Optional) If you do not like to display your bytes threshold as bytes, you can add a GB Threshold field and with some sql on the back end populate the bytes threshold based on your gb threshold field.
      • Select Build a Custom Property from scratch
        • Add Property to Volumes
        • Property Name GbUsage_Marker
        • Superiority Type Floating Point Number
    • Make sure you run Update Report Schemas on all servers that are running web consoles or you will not be able to see the custom properties.

2. Now that we have the fields set, lets populate them.

     I suggest doing this from the sql backed as it is much easier to affect multiple/all entries at once.

    DISCLAIMER: 1. I am not a sql dba. My queries could probably be more efficient if I knew more about sql, but hey, it gets the job done. 2. I currently do not have Orion in front of me, I am writing this months after my last Orion Admin job, and Years after actually implementing these ideas, so things may not be 100% correct. Read over all steps and use your own judgement!

     I am assuming you have already defined your default thresholds. Here is how we are going to import them.

  • This query is to be run against your Orion database, what ever yours may be called.
UPDATE Volumes
SET
 GbUsage_Marker = 2
,DiskUsage_Annotation = 'Bytes Usage Threshold'
,PercentDisk_Marker = 95
,PercentDisk_Annotation  = '% Usage Threshold'
WHERE GbUsage_Marker is null and PercentDisk_Marker is null
GO

UPDATE Volumes
SET DiskUsage_Marker=GbUsage_Marker*1073741824
GO

     This will set your default threshold to any volume where the threshold is blank. If you have entered a threshold to a volume, this will skip it, thus enabling you to set individual thresholds without this over-writing them.

     I also suggest setting this query to run on a schedule to add thresholds to newly added volumes. How often it needs to run depends on how often new volumes are added in your environment and how quickly you want them to alert.

3. Make those volumes alert

     (Thank you to kcarson for the screenshot)

volumealerttrigger.png

3.Finally, Customize those thresholds.

This can be done several ways. Though the Custom Property Editor, sql query, or my favorite, right on the web console.

Just click to edit your volume details and your thresholds should be right there.

If anyone has any clarifications, suggestions or corrections, please post!

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