NetApp: Monitoring of SnapVault/SnapMirror/LUN/Snapshot information with Nagios

As I wrote before, we have a bunch of filers (and a ton of volumes w/ luns on them), that I need to monitor. At first, I tried the existing NetApp Nagios-Plugin(s), but they all use SNMP and with that I can either watch all volumes or none. And that didn’t satisfy me.

Don’t get me wrong, the existing plugins are okay and I still use them for stuff (like GLOBALSTATUS or FAN/CPU/POWER) which isn’t present in the API or real hard to get at, however I wanted more. So I ended up looking at the NetApp API, and ended up writing a “short” plugin for Nagios using Perl.

Maybe if I’m ever bored, I’ll rewrite it using C, but for now the Perl plugin has to suffice.

So far the plugin supports the following things:

  • Monitoring FlexVolumes (simply watching the free space)
  • Monitoring LUN space (the allocated space inside a FlexVolume for iSCSI/FC LUNs)
  • Monitoring Snapshot space (the allocated space inside a FlexVolume for Snapshots)
  • Monitoring SnapVault relations (and their age)
  • Monitoring SnapMirror relations (and their age)

The plugin will return performance data for most (if not all) of those classes. It needs a user on the filer you wish to monitor – which sadly needs to have the admin role.

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