Monitoring Quantum Superloader Tape Libraries with Xymon

Submitted by Bill Arlofski on Mon, 09/06/2010 - 9:12pm

For the past several years Quantum's "Superloader3" tape libraries have been our device of choice when specifying a tape backup library solution for our clients.

The Superloaders are easy to set up and have proven to be one of the most reliable devices we have had the pleasure of working with - and when it comes to backups, reliability is key.

Regardless of the reliability of the tape library itself, there are other factors that can adversely affect your backups, including drives that require cleaning, bad or broken tapes or other miscellaneous issues.

When these issues occur it pays to be proctive by monitoring your tape library so that you may be made aware of these types of things as quickly as possible.

With Xymon being our preferred monitoring solution, naturally we would write a Xymon script to monitor our Superloader tape libraries. Our xymon_quantumsuperloader_check.sh script reports quite a bit of information about the Superloader including the library's time, autoloader & drive status and firmware versions.

In addition to this basic informational reporting, the script can also report the barcodes of the tapes in each slot of the Superloader's two removable magazines and can set an alert on any drive or tape errors reported.

The latest version of this script and instructions to install it on your Xymon server may be found HERE.

posted from my Nokia N900

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