Monitor disk health with HDSentinel and collectd

HDSentinel¹ is a brilliant little freeware capable of showing S.M.A.R.T. data from the disks in various ways. Since these values are important in monitoring and I'm using collecd as monitoring system, I needed a way to integrate the two. I ended up using the Exec plugin of collectd.

The steps:

wget http://www.hdsentinel.com/hdslin/hdsentinel_008_x64.zip
unzip hdsentinel_008_x64.zip
chmod 0755 HDSentinel
mv HDSentinel /usr/bin/hdsentinel

Add the monitor scripts:

vim /etc/collect/scripts/hdsentinel.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

HOSTNAME=`uname -n`
INTERVAL="${COLLECTD_INTERVAL:-1}"

disks=`ls /dev/sd[a-z]`

while sleep "${INTERVAL}"; do
    hdsentinel=`/usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/hdsentinel`
    for disk in ${disks}; do
        data=`echo "${hdsentinel}" | grep -A11 ${disk}`
        name=`echo "${data}" | grep "HDD Device" | awk '{print $4}'`
        disk=${disk##/dev/}

        temp=`echo "${data}" | grep "Temperature" | awk '{print $3}'`
        echo "PUTVAL "${HOSTNAME}/hdsentinel-${disk}/temperature" interval=$INTERVAL N:${temp}"

        tempmax=`echo "${data}" | grep "Highest Temp" | awk '{print $3}'`
        echo "PUTVAL "${HOSTNAME}/hdsentinel-${disk}/temperature-max" interval=$INTERVAL N:${tempmax}"

        health=`echo "${data}" | grep "Health" | awk '{print $3}'`
        echo "PUTVAL "${HOSTNAME}/hdsentinel-${disk}/percent-health" interval=$INTERVAL N:${health}"

        performance=`echo "${data}" | grep "Performance" | awk '{print $3}'`
        echo "PUTVAL "${HOSTNAME}/hdsentinel-${disk}/percent-performance" interval=$INTERVAL N:${performance}"

    done
done

Note: "percent" and "temperature" are types of collectd. Thx deadite66²!

Add the collectd plugin:

vim /etc/collectd/collectd.conf

LoadPlugin exec
<plugin exec>
  Exec "nobody" "/etc/collectd/scripts/hdsentinel.sh"
</plugin>

Add "nobody" to sudoers, but only for hdsentinel ( install sudo if you need to, hdsentinel needs root access to run, but collectd will not exec with root user ):

vim /etc/sudoers

# add to the end
nobody    ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/hdsentinel

(Oh, by the way: this entry was written by Peter Molnar, and originally posted on petermolnar dot net.)