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Scrutiny <-> SmartMonTools

Scrutiny uses smartctl --scan to detect devices/drives. If your devices are not being detected by Scrutiny, or some data is missing, this is probably due to a smartctl issue. The following page will document commonly asked questions and troubleshooting steps for the Scrutiny S.M.A.R.T. data collector.

WWN vs Device name

As discussed in #117, /dev/sd* device paths are ephemeral.

Device paths in Linux aren't guaranteed to be consistent across restarts. Device names consist of major numbers (letters) and minor numbers. When the Linux storage device driver detects a new device, the driver assigns major and minor numbers from the available range to the device. When a device is removed, the device numbers are freed for reuse.

The problem occurs because device scanning in Linux is scheduled by the SCSI subsystem to happen asynchronously. As a result, a device path name can vary across restarts.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/virtual-machines/troubleshoot-device-names-problems

While the Docker Scrutiny collector does require devices to attached to the docker container by device name (using --device=/dev/sd..), internally Scrutiny stores and references the devices by their WWN which is globally unique, and never changes.

As such, passing devices to the Scrutiny collector container using /dev/disk/by-id/, /dev/disk/by-label/, /dev/disk/by-path/ and /dev/disk/by-uuid/ paths are unnecessary, unless you'd like to ensure the docker run command never needs to change.

Device Detection By Smartctl

The first thing you'll want to do is run smartctl locally (not in Docker) and make sure the output shows all your drives as expected. See the Drive Types section below for what this output should look like for NVMe/ATA/RAID drives.

smartctl --scan

/dev/sda -d scsi # /dev/sda, SCSI device
/dev/sdb -d scsi # /dev/sdb, SCSI device
/dev/sdc -d scsi # /dev/sdc, SCSI device
/dev/sdd -d scsi # /dev/sdd, SCSI device

Once you've verified that smartctl correctly detects your drives, make sure scrutiny is correctly detecting them as well.

NOTE: make sure you specify all the devices you'd like scrutiny to process using --device= flags.

docker run -it --rm \
  -v /run/udev:/run/udev:ro \
  --cap-add SYS_RAWIO \
  --device=/dev/sda \
  --device=/dev/sdb \
  ghcr.io/analogj/scrutiny:master-collector smartctl --scan

If the output is the same, your devices will be processed by Scrutiny.

Collector Config File

In some cases --scan does not correctly detect the device type, returning incomplete SMART data. Scrutiny will supports overriding the detected device type via the config file.

example.collector.yaml

RAID Controllers (Megaraid/3ware/HBA/Adaptec/HPE/etc)

Smartctl has support for a large number of RAID controllers, however this support is not automatic, and may require some additional device type hinting. You can provide this information to the Scrutiny collector using a collector config file. See example.collector.yaml

NOTE: If you use docker, you must pass though the RAID virtual disk to the container using --device (see below)

This device may be in /dev/* or /dev/bus/*.

If you're unsure, run smartctl --scan on your host, and pass all listed devices to the container.

# /opt/scrutiny/config/collector.yaml
devices:
  # Dell PERC/Broadcom Megaraid example: https://github.com/AnalogJ/scrutiny/issues/30
  - device: /dev/bus/0
    type:
      - megaraid,14
      - megaraid,15
      - megaraid,18
      - megaraid,19
      - megaraid,20
      - megaraid,21

  - device: /dev/twa0
    type:
      - 3ware,0
      - 3ware,1
      - 3ware,2
      - 3ware,3
      - 3ware,4
      - 3ware,5
  
  # Adapec RAID: https://github.com/AnalogJ/scrutiny/issues/189
  - device: /dev/sdb
    type:
      - aacraid,0,0,0
      - aacraid,0,0,1
  
  # HPE Smart Array example:  https://github.com/AnalogJ/scrutiny/issues/213
  - device: /dev/sda
    type:
      - 'cciss,0'
      - 'cciss,1'

NVMe Drives

As mentioned in the README.md, NVMe devices require both --cap-add SYS_RAWIO and --cap-add SYS_ADMIN to allow smartctl permission to query your NVMe device SMART data #26

When attaching NVMe devices using --device=/dev/nvme.., make sure to provide the device controller (/dev/nvme0) instead of the block device (/dev/nvme0n1). See #209.

The character device /dev/nvme0 is the NVME device controller, and block devices like /dev/nvme0n1 are the NVME storage namespaces: the devices you use for actual storage, which will behave essentially as disks.

In enterprise-grade hardware, there might be support for several namespaces, thin provisioning within namespaces and other features. For now, you could think namespaces as sort of meta-partitions with extra features for enterprise use.

ATA

Standby/Sleeping Disks

Volume Mount All Devices (`/dev`) - Privileged

Scrutiny detects Failure but SMART Passed?

There's 2 different mechanisms that Scrutiny uses to detect failures.

The first is simple SMART failures. If SMART thinks an attribute is in a failed state, Scrutiny will display it as failed as well.

The second is using BackBlaze failure data: https://backblaze.com/blog-smart-stats-2014-8.html If Scrutiny detects that an attribute corresponds with a high rate of failure using BackBlaze's data, it will also mark that attribute (and disk) as failed (even though SMART may think the device is still healthy).

This can cause some confusion when comparing Scrutiny's dashboard against other SMART analysis tools. If you hover over the "failed" label beside an attribute, Scrutiny will tell you if the failure was due to SMART or Scrutiny/BackBlaze data.

Hub & Spoke model, with multiple Hosts.

When deploying Scrutiny in a hub & spoke model, it can be difficult to determine exactly which node a set of devices are associated with. Thankfully the collector has a special --host-id flag (or COLLECTOR_HOST_ID env variable) that can be used to associate devices with a friendly host name.

See the docs/INSTALL_HUB_SPOKE.md guide for more information.

Collector DEBUG mode

You can use environmental variables to enable debug logging and/or log files for the collector:

DEBUG=true
COLLECTOR_LOG_FILE=/tmp/collector.log

Or if you're not using docker, you can pass CLI arguments to the collector during startup:

scrutiny-collector-metrics run --debug --log-file /tmp/collector.log

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