MegaCLI

Plugin: python.d.plugin Module: megacli

Overview

Examine MegaCLI metrics with Netdata for insights into RAID controller performance. Improve your RAID controller efficiency with real-time MegaCLI metrics.

Collects adapter, physical drives and battery stats using megacli command-line tool

Executed commands:

• sudo -n megacli -LDPDInfo -aAll
• sudo -n megacli -AdpBbuCmd -a0

This collector is supported on all platforms.

This collector only supports collecting metrics from a single instance of this integration.

The module uses megacli, which can only be executed by root. It uses sudo and assumes that it is configured such that the netdata user can execute megacli as root without a password.

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

After all the permissions are satisfied, netdata should be to execute commands via the megacli command line utility

Limits

The default configuration for this integration does not impose any limits on data collection.

Performance Impact

The default configuration for this integration is not expected to impose a significant performance impact on the system.

Metrics

Metrics grouped by scope.

The scope defines the instance that the metric belongs to. An instance is uniquely identified by a set of labels.

Per MegaCLI instance

These metrics refer to the entire monitored application.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
megacli.adapter_degraded	a dimension per adapter	is degraded
megacli.pd_media_error	a dimension per physical drive	errors/s
megacli.pd_predictive_failure	a dimension per physical drive	failures/s

Per battery

Metrics related to Battery Backup Units, each BBU provides its own set of the following metrics.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
megacli.bbu_relative_charge	adapter {battery id}	percentage
megacli.bbu_cycle_count	adapter {battery id}	cycle count

Alerts

The following alerts are available:

Alert name	On metric	Description
megacli_adapter_state	megacli.adapter_degraded	adapter is in the degraded state (0: false, 1: true)
megacli_pd_media_errors	megacli.pd_media_error	number of physical drive media errors
megacli_pd_predictive_failures	megacli.pd_predictive_failure	number of physical drive predictive failures
megacli_bbu_relative_charge	megacli.bbu_relative_charge	average battery backup unit (BBU) relative state of charge over the last 10 seconds
megacli_bbu_cycle_count	megacli.bbu_cycle_count	average battery backup unit (BBU) charge cycles count over the last 10 seconds

Setup

Prerequisites

Grant permissions for netdata, to run megacli as sudoer

The module uses megacli, which can only be executed by root. It uses sudo and assumes that it is configured such that the netdata user can execute megacli as root without a password.

Add to your /etc/sudoers file: which megacli shows the full path to the binary.

netdata ALL=(root)       NOPASSWD: /path/to/megacli

Reset Netdata's systemd unit CapabilityBoundingSet (Linux distributions with systemd)

The default CapabilityBoundingSet doesn't allow using sudo, and is quite strict in general. Resetting is not optimal, but a next-best solution given the inability to execute arcconf using sudo.

As root user, do the following:

mkdir /etc/systemd/system/netdata.service.d
echo -e '[Service]\nCapabilityBoundingSet=~' | tee /etc/systemd/system/netdata.service.d/unset-capability-bounding-set.conf
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart netdata.service

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is python.d/megacli.conf.

You can edit the configuration file using the edit-config script from the Netdata config directory.

cd /etc/netdata 2>/dev/null || cd /opt/netdata/etc/netdata
sudo ./edit-config python.d/megacli.conf

Options

There are 2 sections:

• Global variables
• One or more JOBS that can define multiple different instances to monitor.

The following options can be defined globally: priority, penalty, autodetection_retry, update_every, but can also be defined per JOB to override the global values.

Additionally, the following collapsed table contains all the options that can be configured inside a JOB definition.

Every configuration JOB starts with a job_name value which will appear in the dashboard, unless a name parameter is specified.

Config options

Name	Description	Default	Required
update_every	Sets the default data collection frequency.	5	no
priority	Controls the order of charts at the netdata dashboard.	60000	no
autodetection_retry	Sets the job re-check interval in seconds.	0	no
penalty	Indicates whether to apply penalty to update_every in case of failures.	yes	no
do_battery	default is no. Battery stats (adds additional call to megacli megacli -AdpBbuCmd -a0).	no	no

Examples

Basic

A basic example configuration per job

job_name:
    name: myname
    update_every: 1
    priority: 60000
    penalty: yes
    autodetection_retry: 0

Troubleshooting

Debug Mode

To troubleshoot issues with the megacli collector, run the python.d.plugin with the debug option enabled. The output should give you clues as to why the collector isn't working.

• Navigate to the plugins.d directory, usually at /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/. If that's not the case on your system, open netdata.conf and look for the plugins setting under [directories].

  cd /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/

• Switch to the netdata user.

  sudo -u netdata -s

• Run the python.d.plugin to debug the collector:

  ./python.d.plugin megacli debug trace