Email alerts when hard drive fails on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 (PERC5I, SAS)?

Question

I recently purchased a used Dell PowerEdge 2950. I setup the hard drives in RAID-5 configuration. I want to be able to get an email alert if one of the drives fails. I have been trying to determine what the easiest way to setup an email alert would be. The controller card is listed as PERC5I, SAS PowerEdge.

From my numerous Google searches, it looks like I need to install Dell OpenManage Essentials. However ,this looks to be a giant application with tons of bells & whistles for managing many servers, when all I really want is something for this one server. Can anyone offer me any insight into what I could do?

Answer 1

Dell OpenManage Server Administrator.

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/systems-management/w/wiki/1968.dell-openmanage-downloads-explained.aspx

And the Windows download link: http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/555/DriverDetails/DriverFileFormats?DriverId=HPRYT&FileId=2898402194&productCode=poweredge-r720&urlProductCode=False

OpenManage Essentials is, as you say, the console to tie lots of OM systems together. OMSA doesn't have built-in email alerting. So you could either configure it using Essentials or alternatively there's a number of websites that talk you through how to script it. We've done both.

Answer 2

I use OpenManage Server Administrator along with Blat (http://www.blat.net/) to get email alerts. OMSA can execute a command when an alert fires, so I have it set to run Blat with some template emails.

Answer 3

We use Nagios which does SNMP polls of the server, checks not only the hardware, but also CPU usage, disk space and the health of various applications. It's a bit of a steep learning curve getting it and up running, but it's free and can send notifications via Email, SMS, Twitter etc...