Call-home / Alerting
Call-home / Alert Configuration Settings
QuantaStor has a number of mechanisms for monitoring of storage appliance alerts including:
- SNMP
- PagerDuty
- Slack
- Mattermost
- User supplied custom script (/var/opt/osnexus/alerthandlers)
The Alert Manager also allows one to specify thresholds for low storage pool capacity remaining. Administrators should take action to expand the available capacity or migrate resources to ensure continuous normal operation of appliances whenever a pool reaches 80% full as performance can degrade and an out-of-space condition can lead to downtime for users. For more information on the configuration of PagerDuty and other monitoring mechanisms see the Monitoring and Cloud Metrics Integration guide here.
The QuantaStor Alert Manager provides a centralized system for configuring the alerting mechanisms and the capacity thresholds for alerting. All alerts are logged to the Audit Log which can be viewed through the web management interface and via the CLI using the qs-auditlog CLI.
The Alert Manager also enables one to Enable, Disable and Pause specific alerts in the event maintenance is due and the alerting is too frequent, these adjustments are done in the Alert Types tab. Each Alert has a number SNMP ID associated with it which can be viewed when clicking on an alert in the Alerts tab and viewing the properties of the Alert.
Navigation: Storage Management --> Storage Systems --> Alert Manager (toolbar)
IT Service Management Integrations
IT Service Management (ITSM) modules make it easy to integrate alerting with popular ITSM service providers via webhook URL. See this section for more information [1]
Email Alerts
SMTP Mail Server Settings
The settings in this box are required for routing the alerts to the appropriate mail server.
- SMTP Server Address:
- Provide the address for an accessible SMTP relay or mail server.
- Connection Security:
- Choose the appropriate security setting. Options are None, STARTTLS, or SSL/TLS.
- SMTP User/Password:
- Provide a username and password that has access to the provided SMTP server.
Email Sender/Recipient
You can provide an email address or distribution list for appropriate storage administrators who will be monitoring Quantastor. This address will receive all levels of alerts; Informational, Warning and Critical. If you prefer to only receive some alert levels, you can configure alert subscriptions at the User level for user e-mail addresses inside of the User Add or User Modify dialogs.
- This is the mail address that will be presented in the "From" line of the email. The address should be easily identifiable and unique to the specific Quantastor system so that administrators can quickly note the source of the alert.
Append Alerts to Syslog
- Uses the logger tool to append alerts to '/var/log/syslog'
Capacity Alert Thresholds
Capacity alerts are generated when Storage Pools or quota limited Network Shares cross one of the three levels of capacity alert thresholds. The 'warning' threshold is an early warning that indicates free-space is getting low. The 'urgent' threshold provides a follow-up reminder alert after the warning level has been crossed and the final 'critical' alert threshold indicates action should be taken immediately. Share Quotas can be easily addressed by increasing the quota. Storage Pools should generally be expanded at 30% remaining to maintain performance levels.
Storage Pool - Low Free Space Alerts Here you can customize the threshold triggers for Storage Pool capacity alerts. Three levels of severity are available.
Share Quota Low-space This lets you set the percentage you will get a warning at for your share quota space being low. Separate alarms can be set under the Warning, Critical, and Urgent categories.
Alert Types
Alerts may be disabled or paused for 30 days in order to silence persistent alerts while maintenance work is being done. Filtering is supported by clicking on the Title column, checking Filters, and entering the desired text.
SNMP
As an option one can mandate the use of Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Credentials.
Generating Test Alerts
Generate Test Alert This button will bring up a new window that can be used to send a test alert. Enter in a sample message and press ok. Note: you must first save your settings by pressing the OK or Apply button on the Alert Manager window before sending a Test Alert.
External Monitoring
Besides access via REST APIs and the scriptable QS CLI, QuantaStor supports traditional protocols like SNMP and cloud services like Librato Metrics and CopperEgg. Appliances report alerts at various severity levels like ERROR and WARNING. For example, when a disk or battery needs to be replaced it will produce WARNING and some ERROR level events from the controller which in turn generate alerts. Alerts are sent via all configured mechanisms so a system with email and PagerDuty configured will send events to administrators both via email and as a PagerDuty alert to their smart phone. For more information on the configuration of Librato Metrics and other monitoring mechanisms see the Monitoring and Cloud Metrics Integration guide here.