Storage Management's alert or event management features let you monitor the health of storage resources such as controllers, connectors, array disks, and virtual disks.
Alert Monitoring and Logging
The Storage Management Service performs alert monitoring and logging. By default, the Storage Management Service starts when the managed system starts up. If you stop the Disk Management Service, then alert monitoring and logging stops. Alert monitoring does the following:
Updates the status of the storage object that generated the alert.
Propagates the storage object's status to all the related higher objects in the storage hierarchy. For example, the status of a lower-level object will be propagated up to the status displayed on the Health tab for the top-level storage object.
Logs an alert into the Alert log and Microsoft® Windows® application log.
Sends an Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) trap if the operating system's SNMP service is installed and enabled.
NOTE: Storage Management does not log alerts regarding the data I/O path. These alerts are logged by the respective RAID drivers in the system alert log.
Viewing Alerts
Storage Management generates alerts that are added to the Windows application alert log and to the Server Administrator Alert log. To view these alerts in Server Administrator:
Select the System object in the tree view.
Select the Logs tab.
Select the Alert subtab.
NOTE: You can also view these alerts in the Windows Event Viewer. Every alert consists of the following:
Severity — Shows the severity of alert.
Date and Time — Date and time when Storage Management logged the alert.
Description — A brief description of the alert. To expand or collapse the alert
description, click the Description column heading.
Alert Severity Levels
Each alert message in the Storage Management alert log has a severity level. The severity level is displayed in the Severity field of the alert message. The severity level indicates the nature of the alert.
The alert severity levels are as follows:
Table 26-1. Storage Management Alert Severity
Alert Severity
Component Status
OK/Normal/Informational
No action is required. The alert is provided for informational purposes and does not indicate an error condition. For example, the alert may indicate the normal start or stop of an operation.
Warning/Non-critical
A component requires attention. This alert indicates a potential problem, but does not necessarily mean that the system has currently lost data or is nonfunctional. For example, a Warning/Non-critical alert may indicate that a component (such as a temperature probe in an enclosure) has crossed a warning threshold.
Critical/Failure/Error
A component has either failed or failure is imminent. This alert indicates a serious problem such as data loss or a loss of function. For example, a Critical/Failure/Error alert may indicate that an array disk has failed.
SNMP Support for Storage Management Alerts
By default, Storage Management installs SNMP trap forwarding support. For this support to function, you should have SNMP installed on the managed system prior to installing Storage Management.
NOTE: For more information on installation requirements and SNMP, see the Server Administrator documentation.
SNMP Trap Forwarding
The Storage Management alerts are displayed in the Server Administrator alert log and are forwarded to the Windows application alert log. If you have SNMP installed on the managed system (and the SNMP service is running), the Storage Management alerts in the Windows application alert log will be forwarded as SNMP traps. In order for these traps to be viewable, however, a target system or application must be configured to receive these traps. SNMP traps that are generated by Storage Management can be viewed in any standard SNMP-compatible enterprise management console.
The Windows SNMP service must be configured to forward the SNMP traps to the target system or application. When forwarding to an application, the application should also be configured to receive the SNMP traps. The IT Assistant application is already configured to receive the SNMP traps generated by Storage Management.
See your Windows operating system documentation for information on configuring the operating system to forward SNMP traps. This information may be located under such topics as "setting up SNMP" or "SNMP traps." When configuring SNMP for Windows, be sure that the SNMP traps are forwarded to the correct server. For information on configuring an application to receive SNMP traps, see the documentation for that application.
SNMP Trap Definitions
The Storage Management management information base (MIB) defines the SNMP traps that Storage Management generates. These traps correspond to the alerts documented in the "Alert Descriptions and Corrective Actions" section. The MIB is located in ..\sm\mibs\dcstorag.mib, a subdirectory of the Storage Management installation directory.
NOTE: Storage Management supports trap forwarding on both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems.
SNMP Trap Variables
The Storage Management SNMP traps use a set of variables that are included with every trap. These variables are the following:
messageIDEvent
descriptionEvent
locationEvent
objectNameEvent
objectOIDEvent
objectNexusEvent
currentStatusEvent
previousStatusEvent
Viewing SNMP Traps
SNMP traps that are generated by Storage Management can be viewed in any standard SNMP-compatible enterprise management console. These traps are defined in the Storage Management MIB. These traps correspond to the alerts documented in the "Alert Descriptions and Corrective Actions" section. For more information on the MIB and its structure, as well as a change history of the SNMP traps, see the "Introduction" section. For more information on configuring SNMP, see "SNMP Support for Storage Management Alerts."
Alert Descriptions and Corrective Actions
The alerts generated by the redundant array of independent disks (RAID) or Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) controllers and supported by Storage Management are displayed in the Server Administrator Alert subtab or through Windows Event Viewer. These alerts can also be forwarded as SNMP traps to other applications.
SNMP traps that are generated for the alerts are included in the Storage Management MIB. The SNMP traps for these alerts use all of the SNMP trap variables. For the list of storage management alerts and storage management messages, see the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator Messages Reference Guide. This guide is available on the Dell Support website at support.dell.com and on the Dell Systems Documentation CD.
