I poked around, and could not find one single utility or tool for monitoring the Windows MPIO framework, so I whipped up a quick script using VBScript and WMI. The script is called like so:

cscript.exe //NoLogo scripts\CheckMpioPaths.vbs /paths 4

(4 paths are used because the server is multipathed on two fabrics, and each of the active/passive controllers is also on each fabric — the server should see 2 controllers on 2 fabrics each, for 4 paths.)

This will cause the script to issue a Nagios CRITICAL if any multipath-registered LUN shows fewer than the given number of paths.

As usual, you can find the script in the GitHub repository for CheckMpioPaths.

I had originally wanted to make something like this for Cacti, which probably has a much broader install base than the pnp4nagios addon, but the Nagios way was just so easy, and I’d like to share it with anyone who doesn’t want to roll their own basic performance aggregator for it.

This tool gets the following statistics:

• IOPS
• Throughput
• Read percentage
• Cache hit percentage

It gets statistics at the following levels:

• Logical Unit
• Physical Array
• Controller
• Unit

It’s a little quick-and-dirty, but it works:

Like my other projects, it’s hosted on GitHub, so check out the GitHub project for check_smcli_io.

I’ve always wanted to be able to monitor things like number of open sockets, page faults, context switches, and other performance counters. Some of them are available through SNMP; others aren’t. The ones that are available aren’t all available by device. I wanted a little bit more detail.

The other problem with SNMP queries is that a Nagios check doesn’t query an average — something that spikes for a minute is not the same as a condition that persists for several minutes or hours. I wanted to leverage the built-in accounting in sysstat to pull together something Nagios can actually make a little bit of sense out of.

Anyway, I went ahead and created a Nagios plugin that will parse the output of sadf (which is a frontend to sa/sar performance counters). You can query multiple counters at a shot, specifying separate alert thresholds for each (or none at all, if you just want performance data). You can specify, via shell-style glob patterns, which devices you want to include or exclude, so that you can, for example, exclude all “lo” and “tun*” devices from network statistic monitoring. You can also pick the sampling period, so if you want an average of the last 30 minutes the plugin will produce it.

You can do stuff like this:

./check_sa.pl -i -C %usr -C %soft -C %sys -C %idle -D all
SA OK – All counters within specified thresholds. | %idle[cpu0]=96.84;; %idle[cpu1]=96.31;; %idle[cpu2]=97.23;; %idle[cpu3]=95.8;; %soft[cpu0]=0;; %soft[cpu1]=0.01;; %soft[cpu2]=0;; %soft[cpu3]=0.01;; %sys[cpu0]=0.4;; %sys[cpu1]=0.46;; %sys[cpu2]=0.36;; %sys[cpu3]=0.63;; %usr[cpu0]=2.67;; %usr[cpu1]=3.13;; %usr[cpu2]=2.27;; %usr[cpu3]=3.46;;

Or, if you prefer to summarize:

./check_sa.pl -i -C %usr -C %soft -C %sys -C %idle -d all
SA OK – All counters within specified thresholds. | %idle[all]=96.54;; %soft[all]=0;; %sys[all]=0.46;; %usr[all]=2.89;;

It’s still a tiny bit slow — it takes about 500-600 ms to run on the systems I’ve tested — but this should be good enough to be useful without bogging down Nagios too badly.

The script requires the Text::Glob module to be installed, so it can convert shell-style globs into regular expressions to match against.

View the project:

• On GitHub
• On MonitoringExchange