I’ve had a home server for years, at first using Windows Server, then Unraid, and now using Ubuntu server. I’ve long known that I should keep a close eye on my spinning rust, but I never really knew the best way to have that monitoring quietly automated in the background, only sending me a message when something bad shows up. If it matters at all (I assume it doesn’t) I am using ZFS on Ubuntu (but not using ZFS as root. It’s mounted in e.g ~/user/storage. My primary drive is an SSD)

What are you all using for hard drive monitoring? What are you using for notifications and (generally) how are you linking those two together?

  • Avid AmoebaEnglish
    3•2 years ago

    Ingredients

    • A 10-line Python script that parses the zpool status and looks for errors
    • A systemd one-shot service that runs it and puts the output into node_exporter
    • A systemd timer that runs the service every 5 minutes
    • A Prometheus container that among other things has an alert for changes in the zpool health data

    Result

    Once this is setup, it’s trivial to add other checks like smartmontools, etc. If you add Alertmanager, you can get emails and other alerts sent to you while you’re not looking.