If you’ve used IBM SAN products, particularly the DS4000, DS5000 and DS6000 series (which are rebranded LSI), one of the most obnoxious things about it is how you’re pretty much forced to roll your own monitoring tools. Compared to many mainstream vendors (and Sun/Oracle in particular), IBM’s performance monitoring and modelling tools have been lackluster at best and completely unsupplied at worst. The best tool you’ve got is the SMcli, which doesn’t supply a ton of good information, but at least provides you with a starting point for capacity planning.

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.