Scrutiny – A WebUI for smartd S.M.A.R.T monitoring (written in Go) | Hacker News Reader

Scrutiny – A WebUI for smartd S.M.A.R.T monitoring (written in Go)

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144 pointssmcleod30 comments

See also this blog post from 2016 by Backblaze about the SMART stats they use to predict hard drive failure: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate-har...

Relevant because too many different metrics can be hard to make sense of and derive value from. Backblaze have a lot of hard drives. Like a lot a lot. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-backblaze-buys-hard-drive... (2019)

Eversince that backblaze post I've been monitoring only these five relevant SMART values and replace a disk once I have 2 of these values being in the not-normal range. I haven't had a disk failing on me ever since.

Before that, I had lost all trust in SMART, as it would report drives as "healthy" that could fail next day.

While the project is cool looking it's totally usele^W^W usefulness is quite questionable.

In my life I've seen totally dead disks with ideal SMART and disks with SMART indicating what I should had threw them out already yet they worked fine for a literally decade after that. I've configured monitoring and reporting for SMART attribute changes, I've used all available SMART tools on the platforms to diagnose some acting up HDDs. I've replaced drives in the computers, servers, blades and SANs. I've ordered and/or supervised the replacement of drives by padawans and vendor engineers.

You know what I never did?

I never did had or want a dashboard with SMART statuses of all disks I'm responsible for. Because if the drives are healthy I have absolutely zero reason to watch that dashboard. And if some drive is acting up I just need a notification about that (and which disk and where it is) to order the replacement.

Sure, for I'm in some different boat than the author of that project and it can be a cool nerd-party trick to show the SMART status of all of your 48 HDDs in your r/datahoard box... For all other situations (especially if you are on the operations side of things) look for a more classical (and probably more mature?) solutions.

There's two kinds of SMART errors: soft errors, like read retries, occur in normal operation and tell you more about the environment the drive is operating than the health of the drive. Hard errors, like Reallocated sectors, never occur in normal operation so the first time the drive logs one that means the drive is failing and you need to replace it. Monitoring for the first kind of error is pointless, but closely monitoring for the second kind of error will improve your chances of replacing a drive before it loses your data. It's just unfortunate that the error thresholds built into drives won't throw a SMART failure warning before the drive is completely dead.

It's a very different story for SSDs. Those, you definitely do want to monitor in case your workload is burning through the rated write endurance faster than planned for. And reallocated sectors are usually not an urgent problem: a handful early in the life of the drive can be a normal consequence of vendors not aggressively testing (excessively wearing out) a drive before it leaves the factory, and a steadily increasing number as a drive approaches end of life is expected behavior.

But SMART errors usually won't help you know when you're about to lose an SSD to a catastrophic firmware bug, which for many use cases is the more likely cause of death.

While this is already very useful for my homelab setup, I’d like to see if this could be deployed on multiple servers and communicate the status to a master node to watch over all my servers.

If this has something I could tap into to get the status info externally , could privately hack something together to get that.

It does offer a hub/spoke model with one web interface and remote connectors - https://github.com/AnalogJ/scrutiny#hubspoke-deployment

Zabbix (specifically Zabbix Agent 2) has a built-in support for smartctl and template for it.

Yep, Scrutiny has always been designed for a hub&spoke deployment model:

https://github.com/AnalogJ/scrutiny/blob/master/docker/examp...

Hey everyone, author of Scrutiny here! Thanks @smcleod for posting about it, I was surprised by the spike in traffic and stars this morning :)

Happy to answer any questions about Scrutiny you all may have

This looks amazing! Do you have a sample kubernetes deployment or helm chart we could use? I'd love to deploy the metrics collector on my k3s and have all my servers stream in data.

Quick and dirty monlith style just to test it out locally or whatever, not tested - converted a demo docker-compose.yaml file using Kompose: https://gist.github.com/sammcj/73ca0bd15e0ed0d65c0c51b21e38d...

Thank you! Will reach out on GitHub with any questions.

use collectd:

https://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Plugin:SMART

https://collectd.org/documentation/manpages/collectd.conf.5....

It has plenty of both input and output plugins, and it's tiny. Writing new plugins for it is also a breeze, you just need to have app returning a line of text.

Yea a helm chart is needed. Did a quick and dirty daemonset for the collector and omnibus deployment for the database + ui and it works pretty good.

This is kind of an unfortunate name. Broadcom has a utility for getting diagnostic data from their latest gen SAS expanders called scrutiny. I expect once that becomes more popular you're going to see some confusion around which "scrutiny" project involving hard drives you're talking about.

Interesting, I don't recall anyone else bringing this up as a potential name collision previously.

Doing a cursory search of Broadcom + scrutiny doesnt yield many results - other than antitrust litigation

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Broadco...

Do you have a direct link to the tool bychance?

You'll see it referred to as "Scrutiny" but also "scrtnycli". Here's an HP document that references both. https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=sf0000...

Anyone know if it handles the rather different usage of SMART attributes on NVME drives?

I haven't looked into how these types actually get used, but there _are_ different types for nvme vs ata vs scsi attributes: https://github.com/AnalogJ/scrutiny/tree/master/webapp/backe...

as LambdaComplex mentioned, yes Scrutiny can differentiate between NVME, ATA and SCSI drives & SMART metadata/attributes

This is the way of shipping Web UIs, not packing Chrome for the ride.

Looks quite nice.

Thanks!

Love it, thanks for sharing! Super easy to deploy to my home server.

great to hear! If you run into any issues, or have any feedback, please create a github issue, I'd be happy to help out

I've had a lot of hard drives, and seen a lot of them fail, and not once has SMART-monitoring software given me the slightest amount of warning beforehand.

I've been plenty of drives (not sure if call it "a lot" given how many years this is over and how many others have even in home environments) and some have given SMART warnings before otherwise showing issues (or, in most cases, have been replaced before other issues because of such warnings).

A couple have had failures (both full "death" and less systemic errors) without anything being reported by SMART beforehand, but that is the nature of the beast. I suspect you have just been less lucky.

Can this work on ESXi?

It should You can fun the web & collector in hub & spoke mode, where the webapp runs within a VM/container, and the collector runs on the host.

Someone posted about some issues they're running into wiht ESXI & smartctl recently -- https://github.com/AnalogJ/scrutiny/issues/388

but that wasn't scrutiny related from what I can see.

I'm getting the very same result:

When I run it from a datastore:

runtime: epollwait on fd 4 failed with 38 fatal error: runtime: netpoll failed

and when I run it from /:

2022/11/15 15:36:13 ERROR: fork/exec /vmfs/volumes/root/smartmontools/usr/local/sbin/smartctl: no space left on device

Its cool though, I will replace ESXi on this machine with Proxmox. Just a matter of when, not if. Fsck Broadcom.

And I am quite confident its gonna work well with Proxmox, as that's just a modified Debian GNU/Linux which I am far more familiar with than ESXi.

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