Tag: threshold

Monitoring Windows Scheduled Tasks

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Introduction

Tasks scheduler is a Microsoft Windows component that allows you to schedule programs or scripts to start at pre-defined intervals. There are two major versions of the task scheduler: In version 1.0, definitions and schedules are stored in binary .job files. Every task corresponds to a single action. This plugin will not work on version 1.0 of the task scheduler, which is running on Windows Server 2000 and 2003. In version 2.0, the Windows task scheduler got a redesigned user interface based on Management console. Version 2.0 also supports calendar and event-based triggers, such as starting a task when a particular event is logged to the event log, or when a combination of events has occurred. Also, several tasks that are triggered by the same event can be configured to run either simultaneously or in a pre-determined chained sequence of a series of actions.

Tasks can also be configured to run based on system status such as being idle for a pre-configured amount of time, on startup, logoff, or only during or for a specified time. Other new features are a credential manager to store passwords so they cannot be retrieved easily. Also, scheduled tasks are executed in their own session, instead of the same session as system services or the current user. You can find a list of all task scheduler 2.0 interfaces here.

Requirements

Starting from Windows Powershell 4.0, you can use a whole range of Powershell cmdlets to manage your scheduled tasks with Powershell. This plugin for Nagios does not use these cmdlets, as it has to be Powershell 2.0 compatible. Maybe in a few years, when Powershell 2.0 becomes obsolete, I’ll patch the script to make use of the new cmdlets. You can find the complete list of cmdlets here. Failing tasks will always end with some sort of error code. You can find the complete list of error codes here. This plugin will output the exitcodes for failing tasks in the Nagios service description. Output will also notify you on tasks that are still running. We have multiple Windows servers at work with a growing amount of scheduled tasks and each scheduled task needs to be monitored. With the help of Nagios and this plugin you can find out:

  • How many are running at the same time?
  • How many are failing?
  • How long are they running?
  • Who created them?

Versions

Disabled scheduled tasks are excluded by default from 3.14.12.06. In earlier versions, you had to manually exclude them by excluding them with -EF or -ET. It seemed like a logical decision to exclude disabled tasks by default and was suggested by someone on the Nagios Exchange reviewing the plugin.. Maybe one day I’ll make a switch to include them again if specified. As some scheduled tasks do not need to be monitored, the script enables you to exclude complete folders.

Since v5.13.160614 it is possible to include hidden tasks. Just add the ‘–Hidden 1’ switch to your parameters and your hidden tasks will be monitored.

One of the folders I tend to exclude almost all the time is the “Microsoft” folder. It seems like several tasks in the Microsoft folder tend to fail sometimes. So unless you absolutely need to know the state of every single scheduled task running on your Windows Server, I can advise you to exclude it too. You can find the folder and tasks in this locations: C:\Windows\System32\Tasks
It is possible to include tasks or task folders with the ‘–InclFolders’ and ‘–InclTasks’ parameters. This filter will get applied after the exclude parameter. Please note that including a folder is not recursive. Only tasks in the root of the folder will be included.

Help

This is the help of the plugin, which lists all valid parameters:

You could put every scheduled task  you don’t want to monitor in a separate  folder and exclude it with the -EF parameter. Alternatvely, you can use the -ET parameter to exclude based on name patterns. One quite important thing to know is that in order to exclude or include the root folder, you need to escape the backslash, like this: “\\”.

How to monitor your scheduled tasks?

  1. Put the script in the NSClient++ scripts folder, preferably in a subfolder Powershell.
  2. In the nsclient.ini configuration file, define the script like this:

    For more information about external scripts configuration, please review the NSClient documentation. You can also consider defining a wrapped script in nsclient.ini to simplify configuration.

  3. Make a command in Nagios like this:

  4. Configure your service in Nagios. Make use of the above created command. Configure something similar like this as $ARG1$:

Some things to consider to make it work:

  • “set-exectionpolicy remotesigned”
  • Nscp service account permissions => Running with local system should suffice, but I had users telling me it only worked with a local admin. I found out that on some NSClient++ versions, more specific version 0.4.3.88 and probably some earlier versions too, the following error occured when running nscp service as local system: “CHECK_NRPE: Invalid packet type received from server”. After filing an issue on the GitHub project page of NSClient++, Michael Medin quickly acknowledged the issue and solved it from version 0.4.3.102, so the plugin should work again as local system.

Examples

If you would run the script in cli from you Nagios plugin folder, this would be the command:

If you would want to exclude one noisy unimportant scheduled task, the command used in cli would look like this:

If you only want the scheduled tasks in the root to be monitored, you can use this command:

This would only give you the scheduled tasks available in the root folder. The output look like this now.

Final Words

It seems the perfdata in the Highcharts graphs sometimes contains decimal numbers (see screenshot), which is kind of strange as I’m sure I only pass rounded numbers. Seems this is related to the way RRD files are working. To reduce the amount of storage space used, NPCD and RRD while average out the data, resulting in decimals, even when you don’t expect them.

This is a small to do list:

  • Add switches to change returned values and output.
  • Add array parameter with exit codes that should be excluded.
  • Test remote execution. In some cases it might be useful to be able to check remotely for failed windows tasks.
  • Include a warning / critical threshold when discovered tasks exceed a certain duration.
  • I was hoping to add some more exit codes to check, which would make failed tasks easier to troubleshoot. You can find the list of scheduled task exit codes here. The constants that begin with SCHED_S_ are success constants, and the constants that begin with SCHED_E_ are error constants.

Screenshots:

These are some screenshots of the Nagios XI Graph Explorer for two of our servers making use of the plugin to monitor scheduled tasks: Tasks 01 check_ms_win_tasks_graph_02 Let me know on the Nagios Exchange what you think of my plugin by rating it or submitting a review. Please also consider starring the project on GitHub.

Willem

Monitoring NetApp Ontap

Introduction

There are of course numerous way to monitor your NetApp Ontap storage, but this post focusses for now on how to achieve quality monitoring with the help of a Nagios plugin, which was originally developed by John Murphy. The plugin definitely has some flaws, so all help is welcome to improve it. Read the post about debugging Perl scripts, make a fork of the project on Github and start experimenting.

The plugin is able monitor multiple critical NetApp Ontap components, from disk to aggregates to volumes. It can also alert you if it finds any unhealthy components.

NetApp Ontap Logical View

How to monitor Netapp Ontap with Nagios?

  • Download the latest release from GitHub to a temp directory and then navigate to it.
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  • Copy the contents of NetApp/* to your /usr/lib/perl5 or /usr/lib64/perl5 directory to install the required version of the NetApp Perl SDK. (confirmed to work with SDK 5.1 and 5.2)
  • Copy check_netapp_ontap.pl script to your nagios libexec folder and configure the correct permissions

Parameters:

–hostname, -H => Hostname or address of the cluster administrative interface.

–node, -n => Name of a vhost or cluster-node to restrict this query to.

–user, -u => Username of a Netapp Ontapi enabled user.

–password, -p => Password for the netapp Ontapi enabled user.

–option, -o => The name of the option you want to check. See the option and threshold list at the bottom of this help text.

–warning, -w => A custom warning threshold value. See the option and threshold list at the bottom of this help text.

–critical, -c => A custom warning threshold value. See the option and threshold list at the bottom of this help text.

–modifier, -m => This modifier is used to set an inclusive or exclusive filter on what you want to monitor.

–help, -h => Display this help text.

Option list:

volume_health:

Check the space and inode health of a vServer volume on a NetApp Ontap cluster. If space % and space in *B are both defined the smaller value of the two will be used when deciding if the volume is in a warning or critical state. This allows you to accomodate large volume monitoring better. thresh: space % used, space in *B (i.e MB) remaining, inode count remaining, inode % used (Usage example: 80%i), “offline” keyword node: The node option restricts this check by vserver name.

aggregate_health:

Check the space and inode health of a cluster aggregate on a NetApp Ontap cluster. If space % and space in *B are both defined the smaller value of the two will be used when deciding if the volume is in a warning or critical state. This allows you to better accomodate large aggregate monitoring. thresh: space % used, space in *B (i.e MB) remaining, inode count remaining, inode % used (Usage example: 80%i), “offline” keyword, “is-home” keyword node: The node option restricts this check by cluster-node name.

snapshot_health:

Check the space and inode health of a vServer snapshot. If space % and space in *B are both defined the smaller value of the two will be used when deciding if the volume is in a warning or critical state. This allows you to better accomodate large snapshot monitoring. thresh: space % used, space in *B (i.e MB) remaining, inode count remaining, inode % used (Usage example: 80%i), “offline” keyword node: The node option restricts this check by vserver name.

quota_health:

Check that the space and file thresholds have not been crossed on a quota. thresh: N/A storage defined. node: The node option restricts this check by vserver name. snapmirror_health: Check the lag time and health flag of the snapmirror relationships. thresh: snapmirror lag time (valid intervals are s, m, h, d). node: The node options restricts this check by snapmirror destination cluster-node name.

filer_hardware_health:

Check the environment hardware health of the filers (fan, psu, temperature, battery). thresh: component name (fan, psu, temperature, battery). There is no default alert level they MUST be defined. node: The node option restricts this check by cluster-node name. port_health: Checks the state of a physical network port. thresh: N/A not customizable. node: The node option restricts this check by cluster-node name.

interface_health desc:

Check that a LIF is in the correctly configured state and that it is on its home node and port. Additionally checks the state of a physical port. thresh: N/A not customizable. node: The node option restricts this check by vserver name.

netapp_alarms:

Check for Netapp console alarms. thresh: N/A not customizable. node: The node option restricts this check by cluster-node name. cluster_health desc: Check the cluster disks for failure or other potentially undesirable states. thresh: N/A not customizable. node: The node option restricts this check by cluster-node name. disk_health: Check the health of the disks in the cluster. thresh: Not customizable yet. node: The node option restricts this check by cluster-node name. For keyword thresholds, if you want to ignore alerts for that particular keyword you set it at the same threshold that the alert defaults to.