I have been working in IT since 2001 for companies such as Computacenter and Getronics. I started out as a first line support analyst supporting heterogeneous networks but rapidly worked my way up the ranks expanding my knowledge as I went to include areas such as system builds, deployments, networking, and security to name a few.In 2008 I decided to concentrate on the monitoring and management of large enterprise networks using Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007 of which I have extensive knowledge. As testament to this the Windows Management User Group (WMUG), invited me to join their ranks as a Community Leader where I have been invaluable in helping to bolster the OpsMgr skills to the benefit of the group and it's members.I have now moved into an OpsMgr 2007 consultancy role to do what I like most - working with OpsMgr and sharing my knowledge and experiences with the community.
Recently, I had the need to run a logical disk free space report and knowing that this isn’t provided out of the box I created a report and put it into a new management pack. I was then approached about collecting fragmentation data on each drive as well and this got me thinking, why don’t I create an MP that extends the standard management of logical disks. So, I created it !
This management pack collects 21 different statistics on each managed logical drive. These counters are…
Collecting this many counters created its own challenge as I didn’t want to have to run a script multiple times to collect each counter or run it for each drive. To combat this challenge I wrote a data source that all the collection rules use. This data source contains a VBS script that will only run once per server at the scheduled time and collect all 21 pieces of data for each and every logical drive on that server. Writing a data source and rules like this means that cookdown does not get broken and is the most efficient way of collecting and monitoring data.
This management pack also contains a “Free Space” report and a “Top 10 fragmented logical drives” report as well as performance, state and dashboard views for you to consume all the collected data. And, there is also a task to analyze whether a logical drive requires defragmentation or not.
Click the following link if you want to download the MP or review the guide for more information, http://www.systemcentercentral.com/tabid/145/IndexId/64216/Default.aspx. The download will include a sealed copy of the MP, an unsealed copy of the MP and the MP guide.
I hope you find it useful and please let me have and feedback, good or bad, that you may have :-)
David