Sick of explaining to end users why they didn’t get a SCOM disk monitor alert?

Are you sick and tired of explaining to end users why they didn’t get a disk space alert? The built in SCOM disk space monitors are way too complicated. There are thresholds for warning, critical, system drive, and non-system drive.  Then you must hit both percentage and megabyte thresholds. You can’t alert on warning because you won’t get a critical alert. What a mess!

Want to simplify your life? I have created two simple disk space monitors.

First: How to install them.

Download the MP here: https://www.scom2k7.com//downloads/Custom.Windows.Disk.Monitoring.zip

Import the Management Pack; Custom.Windows.Disk.Monitoring.mp  **Note: these require PowerShell to be installed on all your agent managed systems.  By default SCOM 2016 requires PowerShell on all systems.**

 

Next: Disable the built in monitors: Create overrides to disable the built in monitors.

 

 

That’s it.  Now end users will get an warning alert at 10% disk free space and a critical alert at 5% disk free space.  Simplicity Is Genius

 

Want to make your life even easier?   Check out the SCOM Maintenance Mode Scheduler

 

The Deets (Details)

There are two new disk space monitors.  They work by collecting performance counters using the native modules.  When it detects 3 consecutive perfmon samples  over the threshold of 95% for the critical monitor (90% for the warning monitor) at a 20 minute interval.

If the drive is over the threshold for 60 minutes it will then launch a PowerShell script to clean up the percentage provided from perfmon from to a more readable number.  It will also query the drive for remaining GB free and the total size of the disk.  It displays this in the details of the alert.  This is much nicer then the built in ones that don’t tell you the size of the drive.

You can modify how these work by creating overrides.  You will need to create an overrides for each of the different classes.  Windows Server 2008 Logical disk, Windows Server 2012 Logical disk etc..

If you want to still have a separate threshold for your system drives.  You can simply create a dynamic group containing your c: drives.

 

Group Members

 

 

Then create overrides for the group.

Theses monitors were built using Kevin Holman’s excellent SCOM Management Pack VSAE Fragment Library. Monitor.Performance.ConsecSamples.ThenScript.TwoState.mpx

 

Please let me know if you find any bugs.  timmcfadden@scom2k7.com.com

 

11 Responses to Sick of explaining to end users why they didn’t get a SCOM disk monitor alert?

  1. Claus Leclercq July 11, 2017 at 4:49 am #

    Is it not better that the default Monitoring is not Enabled ?

  2. Graham Davies September 3, 2017 at 7:35 am #

    Hi Tim

    Just for information – SCOM 2012 R2 UR11 fixes this “You can’t alert on warning because you won’t get a critical alert.”

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3183990/update-rollup-11-for-system-center-2012-r2-operations-manager
    – “This update allows for configuration of a 3 state monitor to raise alerts; whose severity is in sync with monitor’s health state. One can create a subscription to be notified on modification of alert severity. Even if the monitor’s state keeps toggling between warning and critical, severity of the alert keeps being updated, and a notification fired on an update to the severity of an alert.”

    There are also out of the box monitors for just %age or just MB thresholds. They are disabled by default but are a good alternative to the more complex logical disk space monitors that are enabled by default.

    Keep up the great work 😉

  3. Razi Engg August 30, 2018 at 12:14 pm #

    Hi Tim,

    It worked. Thanks lot for the work on this.

    The alert against the mounted drives give ” There is GB remaining out of a total disk size of GB”, is there a possibility to remove this sentence from the alert description, if the source is a mounted drive or may be more relevant data ?

  4. Dirk Göllner October 16, 2018 at 1:49 am #

    Hi,
    we need the VolumeName in the Alert Description. What must we Change in the MP.
    Cu
    Dirk Göllner

  5. Brad January 2, 2020 at 8:21 pm #

    how to customize the alerts?
    we are sending to mobile devices, and need to specify certain text

    • admin January 3, 2020 at 10:39 am #

      You can create a custom e-mail notification channel. In the custom notification channel under format you would specify what data that you want sent to the mobile devices. If you are asking specifically for this customer disk space alerts management pack. You could unseal the MP and you can send whatever you want.

  6. Marlon September 10, 2020 at 7:49 am #

    Do you have to disable the Built In Monitors or can you have this Management Pack and the Built In active at the same time?

  7. mazch April 21, 2021 at 12:19 am #

    if I were to keep the built in monitor enable, any expected error triggered? plan to use this for different group while existing remain for current group.

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  3. How Logical Disk free space monitoring works in SCOM - Kevin Holman's Blog - July 9, 2019

    […] If you are interested in some REALLY advanced and customized disk space monitoring, check out Tim’s replacement of the built in SCOM OS Disk Space monitoring.  His solution could be customized to show a LOT more advanced data into a customized alert description.  You can also add auto-cleanup recoveries, either into the datasource script itself, or in a recovery action assigned to the monitor.  https://www.scom2k7.com//sick-of-explaining-to-end-users-why-they-didnt-get-a-disk-monitor-alert/ […]

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