Dear All Thwack Members,
It is my pleasure to present you with this elegant template to help you out with monitoring free disk space across all your windows servers. As a matter of fact - 80% of all our incidents are disk space related and I hope this will help you out to handle this part in a simple and very flexible way
What's in the tin?
- Monitor all your disks on all servers (requires just 1 SAM license per server)
- Set global threshold based on Free MBytes AND Free % levels. This works perfectly well for both large (TBytes) disks and small (MBytes) disks
- Differentiate between warning and critical level
- Set overrides on a per disk per server level (very granular approach)
- Exclude disks you do not want monitoring (either completely or setup overrides)
- Track usage as a graph
- Have it on your dashboard as a green/yellow/red blob (which is not possible out-of-the-box with SAM volumes)
Screenshots:
Component
Multi stat chart
Script Arguments:
Global Statistic:
Individual Disk Statistic for global overrides (example for "J" drive)
Dashboard:
Benefits:
- If you are short on licenses - this will help you to monitor all disks with just 1 license per server
- The biggest benefit for me (as my SAM is unlimited and first point is not really applicable) is that I can have it as a group item on my dashboard. Very handy. Screenshot above
- Ability to compare against both MBytes and Percentage levels definitely makes it very self-sustained and self-managed template. It just works for every single disk. I only have very few exceptions configured across 700+ volumes
- When you add a new disk (in virtual world this is quite common) - you have your monitoring automatically enabled for it (without the need to discover new disk in SAM, what I often forget)
Additional info:
- This template has been build and improved upon my previous version, which was published here: Universal Monitoring and Alerting on free space for all logical disks across all servers
User description notes (copy-paste from template, for those craving more info):
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This smart script will monitor free space on all fixed local disks on Windows server.
* Global threshold, which is going to be applied for all disks on a server by default, is based on free percentage AND free bytes (for example, a particular disk has to be less than 5% AND less than 20GB to fire off warning alert). This works perfectly well for large disks measured in TBytes and small disks measured in MBytes
* You can exclude particular disk on a particular server from being monitored by global threshold and set custom threshold for this disk instead
* You can differentiate between critical/warning threshold levels.
>>> For the global threshold - this is achieved by incrementing "Statistic" counter in 100s for any critical breached disk and in 1s for any warning breached disk. (for example: Statistic value 102 means that we have 1 disk breached critical threshold and 2 disks have breached warning. Note, that when disk falls in critical level it will also be in breach of warning level as well. So, value 101 will indicate that 1 disk has fallen into critical level; likewise value 102 will indicate 1 disk critical and 1 disk warning)
>>> For the custom threshold - you just simply set values in SAM template for warning and for critical level for a particular disk
How to exclude disk / configure custom threshold:
When you need to override global threshold for a particular disk - you would first exclude this disk from being monitored by global threshold and second - you would configure separate threshold, which is based on free MBytes value, in SAM template below.
For example: disk F needs to trigger an alert when it drops below 150GB. In this case you would override script arguments with "${IP} 2 5000 5 20000 A,B,F" and you would set critical threshold to "less than 150000" as a SAM threshold value. You can also set SAM warning threshold as 200000 to be notified in advance
Limitations (all with very limited impact on usability and flexibility):
- You can only define custom thresholds for the first 8 disks (C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J). Note, that global threshold will still be applicable for all logical fixed disks, regardless of the quantity (unless you exclude any of them as explained above). In fact - this is very limited limitation as most of the servers will probably not have as many disks and even if they will - it is very rarely when you will need to define custom thresholds anyway - so, probability of this limiting your monitoring abilities is very low
- When you exclude particular disk - you can only set "MBytes" threshold value (no percentage threshold here). This is also very very limited issue, because at the time when you exclude particular disk - you already know exact size of it and you can work out yourself at what level in MBytes you want an alert to come through.
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Enjoy, comment, like, rate 
To Your Monitoring Success,
Alex
Update: 08/01/2016 - Slightly update script as per comments below to enable it to pick up mount points. Also, improve variable for disks exclusions - you will now need to enclose disk letter in square brackets to exclude it. Example usage is in the script/template itself. Thank you, Alex
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