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Potential Oversight/Bug in SRM FileShare Alert "Available Fields" Options

When building an Alert Trigger Condition or Inserting a Variable into an Alert Trigger Action for a SRM "File Share" object, the available Fields to select are quite thin, especially for a new state-of-the-art module like SRM.  I'd expect it to have at least the features of similar objects that other modules have, like a Used/Free space percentage field and especially a Status field.   I hope this is just an oversight that can be corrected.  There is indeed a File Share Status field in the FileShare table of the database, but you can't select it in the Alert selector (more on this later). 

Surprisingly there is no Percentage field for file share usage in the database even though a calculated percentage value is shown in the web console.  That means somebody must have hard coded the percent calculation into the web code instead of having that data inserted into the DB (like it should be done) and pulling the data from there.  Data should never be calculated in web code.  It should always be put into a DB field and pulled from, otherwise there is no way for the user to access or manipulate the data (like in my case right here.)  Also, there isn't any way to set thresholds for individual File Shares that I can find.  Since there is no Percent used/free data kept for individual file shares, I guess it makes sense there is no individual thresholds feature available... 

As far as the File Share Status, I'm honestly not sure what would cause a FileShare status to change since even though there is a Global Threshold for File Shares called "File System Used Capacity", I don't see any Percent used/free data kept in the SWQL tables except the "CapacityFileSystemPercentage" field in the SRM Volumes table.  A Volume is not a File Share.  Several File Shares can be on a Vfiler/Vserver's Volume.  I need to be able to threshold a File Share against it's Quota Percentage used.  The only time I would threshold a File Share against the entire Volume percent used would be for Shares that don't have quota's.  Even then I wouldn't threshold at the Volume level, I would threshold at the File Share level.  I don't see how the File Share percent thresholds even make sense the way they are now.

I really hope I don't need to put in Feature Requests for this as this seems like the most basic thing that an object like this should have in any Orion module, much less a module that was just recently built. 

As it stands now I have to build a custom SWQL condition that will have to calculate the percentage of a File Share's quota is used by adding the Used Space and Free Space together and dividing the Used Space by that Total, then have that percentage compared to the threshold. Since there is no Percent Threshold value for File Shares, I'm also going to have to build a custom property field called FileShareThreshold_Critical just so I can set Used Space Percentage thresholds on individual file shares without having the threshold value hard coded into the alert logic. 

Please SolarWinds' SRM team, tell me you guys just forgot to include these trivial to implement yet very important features into your product and that you plan to correct this soon?  :-) 

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  • Can you post your SWQL? I can look into this.

  • Post what SWQL?  My issue isn't with writing the SWQL.  I know how to do that.  My issue is that I have to write SWQL at all...  I shouldn't have to.  Percent used/free for each file share should be kept in the database.  Thresholds for the percent  used/free values should be able to be set against each share.  We should be able to alert on these values when building a SRM File Share alert.  We should be able to alert against a File Share's status.  Currently none of these things are possible and it's really frustrating because it totally should be there.

  • Thought perhaps you had already SWQl'd it which is something I could have used to speak with dev. I'll dig and share why we currently aren't doing this OOB.

  • I've created an internal feature request. Thanks again for the input and detailed description!

  • Thanks mbussey.  And I apologize if the tone of my post came off as a little angry.  I was definitely frustrated since it despairs me when I see such a missed opportunity, but I wasn't angry.  Thanks for seeing through that to grab the facts and get this escalated. 

    I have high hopes for SRM.  I also just recently convinced management to purchase it since XIV support is coming out and hopefully V9000 and A9000 support will be offered down the road, so I guess you could say I feel a little responsible on my end when a miss is identified in the product and I may take it a little more personally than I should.

    Keep up the great work!

  • Just curious, did this feature request ever happen or can anyone provide any swql to find this info?

    I've looked in the fileshares table and there is a free and used capacity but it appears to me that this information is for the volume, unless by chance all the shares I see are the same size, I guess that is possible....

  • This will depend on the type of array. In general, if a file share does not have a quota set the capacity values will be equal to the NAS Volume capacity details.

  • Thanks @mac4u I'm totally new to SRM, the type of Array is an EMC Isilon.  Do you know if that is one I could have our storage team set a quota for and then I could display what the application team wants?

  • I don`t think there is quota monitoring for EMC Isilon. You can open a feature request through support.