Visual monitoring of disks

[attila.sukosd]

Hi guys,

So I got the chance to build and setup a backblaze pod, and it got me thinking that it would be awesome to have a web interface to monitor the disk statuses for all the 45 drives, in their physical layout instead of one huge list of all the disks.
I thought it could be skinable, so it could be adjusted to all kinds of NASes, and it could monitor temperature, SMART status, display ZFS configurations visually.

Would this be something that people are interested in?

I've got a small test running in a jail and now I'm looking into integrating it in a nice way in the UI. ;)

 

[Stephens]

Would this be something that people are interested in?

That's rhetorical, right? If it's free and easy to set up, count me in. FreeNAS already monitors SMART, it's just difficult for people to set up correctly, and you don't get real time monitoring, just notification if a problem is detected. Can you provide a screen capture (don't attach it, host it somewhere, then link to it) of your app?

I want to ask you how your SMART monitoring handles idle/standby/whatever drives, but then I'm vaguely remembering something about plugins/jail (I don't currently use them) keeping drives from sleeping. Comments?

 

[attila.sukosd]

It uses smartctl to look up infos about the disk, which has an argument whether checking should be done based on the state of the drive:

-n MODE, --nocheck=MODE (ATA)
No check if: never, sleep, standby, idle (see man page)

That said, I haven't confirmed that this actually works :)


Here is a sneak-peek, its still in the early alpha states so its missing a lot of functionality. Its fully skinable so it should be easy to adopt to other devices too.

 

[Stephens]

Looks good. I'm not sure yet what the skinnable aspect implies, but I hope it'll be able to run on my setup. I was going to offer to be a beta tester, but I don't have a test machine yet. I don't see any way it can mess up data, but still.

 

[rnicolas]

That looks nice good job.

 

[janptak]

This would be killer feature. Is there any progress made? :p

 

[Stephens]

He hasn't visited the site since November 8th.

 

[clownphish]

Shame, this looked nice.

 

[fracai]

It looks like the code is at least available on GitHub: https://github.com/atiti/diskviewer

I'm not sure how much is there, but someone could fork it and continue the work.

 

[attila.sukosd]

Hey guys, don't write me off yet ;)

Sorry for no updates, I've been distracted by "life" so I have't been able to spend as much time on it as I would've liked...

I've also been a bit insecure about the development path (which I could definitely use some input for):

1. Have this running in a jail and add some menu option for it in the FreeNAS GUI? (This option would allow it to be pretty generic, so it could be used possibly in other places too)
2. Change to python and integrate it into the FreeNAS UI

 

[cyberjock]

If you run it in the jail there's no immediate way to ask for drive temps and status. So you'll definitely have to come up with a way to pass that information through to the jail.

 

[attila.sukosd]

If you run it in the jail there's no immediate way to ask for drive temps and status. So you'll definitely have to come up with a way to pass that information through to the jail.

Yea, I thought I would make the information query modular, so it could be adopted to different methods, fx. over ssh with an identity key, or HTTP request(s) to some sort of API.

 

[MaIakai]

this, i want this so bad.

Currently trying to hack the gui up to add more monitoring information>

It's not going well..