NetApp SnapMirror Monitor Script – Part 2 using PoshOnTap

My first attempt at this worked out pretty well, but I’ve been looking into PoshOnTap, and come up with a more efficient script.  PoshOnTap is really something to look at if you have a NetApp, and are getting deeper into using Powershell.

To get started, download PoshOnTap from http://poshontap.codeplex.com/, and install it.

Once PoshOnTap is installed, to use the cmdlets, it must be imported into your Powershell session using Import-Module PoshOnTap

Now to connect to my second filer, the one that is performing the SnapMirror role, I need to connect to it.  This is done with Connect-NaServer -Filer filername -UserName user -Password password. I’ve omitted the username and password, as my Filer is joined to my Active Directory Domain.  My Powershell session is being run from an account which is part of the domain.

In my previous post, I had to remotely execute a “snapmirror status” command using ssh through plink.  Not very elegant.  From the command line, “snapmirror status”, will only show Source, Destination, State, Lag, and Status.

Using Powershell I can execute the same type command, and actually get more information. Information like:

• BaseTimeStamp (time of the last update)
• BaseSnaphot (name of the Snapshot on the destination filer)
• ContentState
• CurrentTransferSize (showing the size of a current transfer)
• CurrentTransferType
• LastTransferSize (how many bytes were transferred)
• LastTransferDuration (how long the last SnapMirror took)
• LastTransferType (Did an initialization occur? Did an update take place?)

So how would I get the same information through Powershell?

Get-NaSnapMirror by itself will show the same information as snapmirror status does, albeit in a different order.

Now, if we change the output format from Format-Table (default) to Format-List (or FL) we will see some very different output.

Now to use some of that output for our monitoring.  I created the following script to pull more information than my last script

#Load the PoshOnTap Module
Import-Module PoshOnTap

#Connect to the Filer
Connect-NaServer -Filer netapp2

#Pull Our Data
get-NaSnapMirror|select Source,Destination,Status,State,Lag,LastTransferSize,LastTransferDurration|ft

Which returns

Now, to get the output into e-mail, I’m going to have to massage the output a little bit.  Here’s the resulting script:

#Load the PoshOnTap Module
Import-Module PoshOnTap

#Connect to the Filer
Connect-NaServer -Filer netapp2

#Pull The Data
$body = Get-NaSnapMirror|Select Source,Destination,Status,State,Lag,LastTransferSize,LastTransferDurration|Out-String

#Send e-mail
Send-MailMessage -From "user@yourdomain.com" -To "user@yourdomain" -Subject "NetApp Replication Script" -SmtpServer mail.domain.com -Body $body

Which will give an output something like this:

Pretty cool how Powershell will let us use less code, and get more done.

I can add “Where-Object { $_.Lag -gt “01:0:00″} |” between “Get-NaSnapMirror |” and “Select Source,” to only show the volumes that have a lag greater than 1 hour.  Again, pretty flexible.

Now I’m off to work on Part 3, where I post this information to a SQL database for historical purposes.