Comparing Disk Monitoring Products

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The best way to keep track of your disk configuration is to use the UNIX commands provided with the operating system, such as ioscan and vgdisplay. The information tools in STM can provide additional configuration information, such as the firmware revision and serial numbers . You may want to save all of this output for comparison purposes later. Then, if a disk problem occurs, the configuration history can help to track when a change was made. The System Administration Manager presents a textual summary of the disk configuration for HP-UX systems. On Sun Solaris systems, Enterprise SyMON can be used to graphically display the physical system layout.

If configuration information needs to be collected from a variety of systems, querying the system MIB by using a MIB Browser may be more efficient, especially for multiplatform environments, because you will need to remember only one tool to get the information.

Disk failures can be detected initially by using EMS DVM, or the EMS Hardware Monitors for the appropriate hardware device. EMS DVM is unique in that it can also be used to detect the loss of a disk mirror. After a problem is reported , you may use STM for further diagnosis. These products are available only on HP-UX. Enterprise SyMON provides some basic hardware diagnostics for Sun Solaris environments, including the ability to send events for disk failures.

To avoid the need to monitor and repair disk devices, you may want to establish a support contract with Hewlett-Packard. In that case, disk problems are reported directly to the Hewlett-Packard Response Center, and based on trending information collected by HP Predictive, a support engineer may be sent to replace the disk before a failure actually occurs.

MeasureWare and BMC PATROL have comparable disk monitoring functionality, and both primarily provide disk performance metrics. The choice of tool is likely to depend on the other activities that you are doing. For example, PerfView receives its information only from MeasureWare agents . BMC PATROL and MeasureWare can both send information to IT/O. BMC PATROL's UNIX KM, which provides disk metrics, can be used with a wide variety of other KMs. Both tools collect a large amount of data, so you may want to analyze how each performs in your environment before you select one.

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