During a training a customer asked me how was possible to monitor the usage of the disk of the K1000 and K2000 appliances.
My first idea was to suggest them to have a look in the logs tab time to time or read the Charlie Root email that the appliance periodically sends but they were looking of something different so I started to look into SNMP.
I never used SNMP in my life so I started to dig about the topic.
To dig in the SNMP I used two powerful software:
MIB Browser from iReasoning and SNMPGet from SNMPSoft.
Using MIB Browser I found out that the K1000 and K2000 are exposing a table called hrStorage where you can find all the information about the storage space used and the available one.
If you click on the table to select it and you press CTRL+T you will see the table.
This is important to determine the OID of the value you are interested in.
Once you found the OID of the value you are insterested to monitor you have a couple of choices.
Or you but the license for the professional edition of the MIB Browser that is even able to poll periodically the value and graph it or, for more flexibility, you can use the command line SNMPGet to dump only that value.
This is the sample command line:
SnmpGet.exe -r:k1000.kace.local -o:.1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.3.1.6.33
You can redirect the output in a file and then use a script to interpreter it and....so on.
I shot a short video on how I use these software:
It is important to use the MIB Browser (or equivalent) to find out the OID to monitor. Currently I do not know if the OID about the disk space is the same (has the same index) on all the appliances so before to implement a solution with the command line SNMPGet is better to find out.
NOTE: SNMPSoft and iReasoning are third party companies. Please refer to their web site about the license agreement about the use of their software.
The object identifier will be the same as they are a standard and they are bundled inside a MIB. The SNMP/MIB tool is using a standard MIB (database of OIDs). The OID for the "hrStorageTable" you created the table view for is "1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.3". It will contain sub-OIDs let's say "hrStorageUsed" with another OID which is "1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.3.1.6".
In the command line example, we can see "1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.3.1.6.33" which is a combination of "hrStorageUsed" and "hrStorageIndex". Only to clarify, on a different system as the Dell KACE appliance, you will high likely query a different "hrStorageIndex" as you may want to query different partitions instead of the "/" as in the example/video.
So yea, the OID will be the same usually but the "hrStorageIndex" just if we are lucky. Dell/IBM/HP have their own MIBs and own OIDs in case you will be monitoring a physical appliance. You can load them into the tool also.
Some insight on calculating this in human readable values (using exact 1024 bytes per KB):
hrStorageUsed.33 * hrStorageAllocationUnits.33 = 5736955 * 2048 = 11749283840 bytes = 10.94 GB
hrStorageSize.33 * hrStorageAllocationUnits.33 = 126692445 * 2048 = 259466127360 bytes = 241.64 GB
The "33" in the above two lines is our "hrStorageIndex", pick any other "hrStorageIndex" to calculate a nice GB or MB value for other partitions.
Thanks for sharing this idea and get my head spinning! OpenManage Essentials fits really well (can also be equipped with all sorts of MIBs for 3rd party monitoring, essential for SNMP traps) here as it would be able to wake us up during the night if our servers... wait... I gotta go!
Peace,
Rasko - RaSko 11 years ago
If you have the same problem on the K1000 you can delete software installer that you do not need anymore and download only the detected patches (new setting available in 5.4 and 5.5.
Regards,
Marco. - StockTrader 10 years ago
IYou can use this functionality to add the K1000 & K2000 to the K1000 inventory.
In version 6.4 it is even better because we introduced Asset Subtypes so you can create a subtype of device called K1000 Appliance and add to it the field(s) for the disk space.
Then you can create a SNMP Inventory Configuration profile to map that fields and....you've all automatised without the need of external 3rd part tools :-) - StockTrader 8 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAt1aaEzCc4 - StockTrader 8 years ago