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6652 Views 9 Replies Latest reply: Oct 11, 2013 8:55 AM by Eric Gemme RSS
cordeos Rank: White Belt 15 posts since
Oct 11, 2012
Currently Being Moderated

Oct 12, 2012 9:08 AM

Fix for WMI Windows drive usage stats

We love (and sometimes cuss at) Zenoss but are working to improve the great work put into the some of the Zenpacks we depend on like the Window WMI related ZenPacks. 

 

One of the key components of our monitoring system is the stats on available drive space... for alerts of low disk space and also trend information for predictive analysis of 'drive full' issues, hints something is wrong (sudden jump or fall in disk space usage), and capacity planning.

 

Unfortunately, since moving to Zenoss 4.2.0 we have not been able to get the WMI/Windows drive usage stats to work properly at all.  The linux command and SNMP modelling works great.  So we are diving in to try and get this important piece sorted out.


Attached is our initial "quick" fix for the WMI FileSystemMap implementation.  This provides the following changes to the current FileSystemMap for the WMI modelling:

 

1) Modelling and stats collection of Used Bytes and Free Bytes now works - but ONLY for Windows NFTS drives formatted to 4096KB block sizes (Windows default)

* the problem with the current drive space stats seems to be the blocksize 'guess' mechanism since Windows does not provide an easy way to get this info.  For an initial quick fix, since almost all our monitored Windows systems use the default 4096KB allocation unit (blocksize), we just hard-coded the block size calc to use 4096.   We are still working on a better way to do this rather than hard-coded blocksize

.

2) The formating of the drive information labels has been cleaned up (to our preferences) so it shows

     Drive letter:  Volume name  (Serial No.: ###...)

     eg   D:  Data Drive  (Serial No: C835434D5)

 

3) Automatically ignores any drive names of "System Reserved" which eliminates the small 100MB boot/system partion in Windows 7/2008

 

4) Automatically ignores any drive volumes which start with "//?/" which is what non-native or raw partitions show up as (such as USB drives for Windows backup, some inaccessible but connected SAN volumes, etc.)

 

 

To implement our fix just replace (recommend to cp a backup copy of the original files first) the following two files in ZENOSS  then restart ZENOSS:

FileSystemMap.py (source)

FileSystemMap.pyc (compiled python binary)

 

The standard ZENOSS folder location is:

/opt/zenoss/ZenPacks/ZenPacks.zenoss.WindowsMonitor-1.0.2-py2.7.egg/ZenPacks/zenoss/WindowsMonitor/modeler/plugins/zenoss/wmi

 

After copying the files, restart Zenoss with "service zenoss restart"

If you find the changes do not appear, you may need to remove the cached python binary file.  To do this, navigate to the above wmi folder and delete the temp file with:  "rm FileSystemMap.py~"

 

you can also download these two files from here:

http://www.cordeos.com/downloads/zenoss/FileSystemMap.zip

 

We will appreciate any comments or cooperative assistance to impove this great open source project.

 

Capture.JPG

Attachments:
  • jmp242 ZenossMaster 4,060 posts since
    Mar 7, 2007
    Currently Being Moderated
    1. Oct 12, 2012 10:31 AM (in response to cordeos)
    Re: Fix for WMI Windows drive usage stats

    Going forward, you may want to consider using a zProperty query for the block size - then users can change if necessary (easily)...

     

    --

    James Pulver

    ZCA Member

    LEPP Computer Group

    Cornell University

  • jmp242 ZenossMaster 4,060 posts since
    Mar 7, 2007
    Currently Being Moderated
    3. Oct 12, 2012 10:52 AM (in response to cordeos)
    Re: Fix for WMI Windows drive usage stats

    Ahh, yes, I was thinking it would indeed be a per host setting. We don't usually use different settings for different disks inside a system here. Zenoss doesn't deal well with components that need special properties per component that I know of...

     

    --

    James Pulver

    ZCA Member

    LEPP Computer Group

    Cornell University

  • dpetzel Rank: Brown Belt 1,141 posts since
    Oct 17, 2010
    Currently Being Moderated
    4. Oct 12, 2012 8:01 PM (in response to cordeos)
    Re: Fix for WMI Windows drive usage stats

    Jay,

    This is great stuff. Out of curiosity, have you file a bug report with patch attached to zenoss inc using their Jira system? I'd guess they would like to include the fixes (http://jira.zenoss.com)

  • Pete McKenna Newbie 2 posts since
    Oct 15, 2012
    Currently Being Moderated
    5. Oct 15, 2012 10:18 PM (in response to cordeos)
    Re: Fix for WMI Windows drive usage stats

    Jay,

     

    I'm just starting to use Zenoss again after quite a few years, and decided to try out a WMI connection to a Windows 2008 r2 host with a default and non-default block size after seeing this post, disk utilization is as you say a rather important item to track. Zenoss 4.2 seems to do fine with both of them, and it's size estimates match the OSes own readings so, I'd like to hear more about what kind of systems you were having problems with? I set my second drive to use 16K block size.

    I'd like to understand more about where this monitoring breaks down, and dig into why if it's going to cause me problems. My test is obviously a very small test, but I'm happy to see it seems to work OK for Windows 2008 R2 at least, as our environment has lots of similar host.

     

    Thanks

     

    Pete

  • Eric Gemme Rank: White Belt 30 posts since
    Aug 5, 2011
    Currently Being Moderated
    6. Oct 11, 2013 7:24 AM (in response to cordeos)
    Re: Fix for WMI Windows drive usage stats

    Hi,  I patched these two files with the expected success:   all logical volumes were gone.

     

    Yesterday prior applying ZenUp SP71,  I managed to remove this quick patch to make sure I don't mess with diffs.   Surprise,  the bug is back!   Zenoss team apparently didn't include this fix in their SP,  yet this bug has been raised and fixed months before the release of SP71.   Shouldn't we expect such fixes to be included in next SP ?

  • Eric Gemme Rank: White Belt 30 posts since
    Aug 5, 2011
    Currently Being Moderated
    9. Oct 11, 2013 8:55 AM (in response to cordeos)
    Re: Fix for WMI Windows drive usage stats

    Ok.   I understand your point of view.   But trying to catch perf data from a component that doesn't work may not be a bug,  but is undesirable.   I wouldn't mind seeing Logical Volumes stats if they were working,  but since they make Zenoss trash errors because WMI counters are not available,  these should be ejected permanently as the patch does.   If you were about to find a solution,  I wouldn't mind,  but I understood it is a WMI limitation so why keeping it reported when no data comes in?