I am currently setting up monitoring in our company network with checkmk. So far it’s been a smooth ride and all switches/APs/servers were fairly easy to add.
Nonetheless I wasn’t able to monitor our dell powerstore storage. It uses snmp push method which I was not sure how to set up so I tried to find an API integration like the one which worked for my ESXi infrastrukture.
I found the following extention package: Checkmk Exchange, but I was not able to setup the API integration.
I got a 403 client error as you can see from the attached screenshot.
Upon some research I noticed that some other users stated that this extension is not working for dell powerstores.
Has anybody successfully integrated their dell powerstores into checkmk?
I would appreciate any advice/help.
The extension package you’re using isn’t for Dell PowerStores, it’s for Dell Storage Manager, which is a different product.
The PowerStore Manager has an API but I don’t think anyone has written a custom package to query it yet. The redfish idea is good but I’m not sure if the PowerStores themselves have redfish.
My client is using PowerStore 5000Ts, which are being managed by PowerStore Manager. The arrays send SNMP traps (unfortunately SNMP get is not supported) which you configure via Settings > Networking > SNMP on the PowerStore manager. Set the network name to your checkmk server. Change the minimal severify of alerts based on how much ‘noise’ you can handle. Info may be too much!
In Checkmk, you then need to configure the Event Console to receive SNMP traps from your environment and parse them.
Once traps are being received you’ll want to translate the raw traps into more meaningful info. To do this, download the PowerStore MIB from dell.com (info here: How to find Dell Management Information Base (MIB) files? | Dell UK) and upload that into Checkmk via Setup > Event Console > Event Console > SNMP MIBs. There is also a rule (search for translate under setup) which you need to turn on to enable the translation.
So now you should have traps coming into the Event Console. You can create rules based on the trap text so teams are alerts if critical traps are received.
However, these traps will only exist in the event console. It’s nice to see the actual PowerStores as hosts within checkmk, so you can see at a glance their status. To associate the traps with hosts in Checkmk, you’ll need to create a host entry for each PowerStore node you want to monitor. Then go to Setup > Event Console > Rules and select Check event state in Event Console. Create a rule to match the hosts with Hostname and IP address. Checkmk will then display the SNMP trap status (and whether they’ve been acknowledged) as as a service within the host. You can probably set checkmk to ping the nodes and setup parent/child relationship with the cluster, but i’ve not done that yet.
Thanks for that! I’m happy to give back, as you’re right, I’ve been lurking around here for about 9 months, trying to learn as much as I can about Checkmk! The product is so flexible and powerful that sometimes it can be confusing to understand the concepts and error messages - this forum has been a helping hand.
I’m happy to give back, as you’re right, I’ve been lurking around here for about 9 months, trying to learn as much as I can about Checkmk! The product is so flexible and powerful that sometimes it can be confusing to understand the concepts and error messages - this forum has been a helping hand.