You can monitor system disk space on a continuous basis for selected disk families and selected individual disk units. To monitor an MCP disk family, specify the family name and optionally, the monitoring threshold levels for that disk family in the configuration file for the interface software. To monitor an individual disk unit, specify the index of the unit in parentheses following the disk family name. See Section 3 for more detail.

You can specify an area size to be used for reporting available space and for applying thresholds to both families and packs. Frequently, the usable space on a pack or family is less than the total space, because of disk fragmentation. The usable area size is application dependent and will vary between families. You can specify that only areas of a certain size should be counted when applying these thresholds.

You can specify what is a usable area size for each family or pack, so that the interface software reports on usable space, rather than available space. To periodically report the amount of available space on a disk unit or family without regard to any threshold specify the disk or family name without a threshold.

You can use disk threshold monitoring to give operations personnel early warning of pending disk capacity problems. Operators can then remedy the problem before host processes are put on hold because of unavailable disk space.

The interface software periodically queries the host system software about the available disk space and compares this amount to the threshold value you specify. You can change the threshold levels for a disk family by changing the threshold–% parameters in the configuration file. See Section 3.

You can monitor the disk space of up to 1,000 disk families or individual disk units for each of the four severity levels (4,000 total thresholds). At the same time, you can report the amount of available space for display in Operations Sentinel Console for up to 1,000 disk families or individual disk units.

For each configured disk family or unit, the interface software provides the following information:

This information is presented using Operations Sentinel. For Operations Sentinel levels 6.x, Operations Sentinel is an optional component. To use this information, you must purchase and install Operations Sentinel. It is recommended that you upgrade to Operations Sentinel level 6.6 or later, since these levels have the necessary classes and classifications predefined.

For Operations Sentinel on a Windows server you do not need to purchase and install Operations Sentinel separately. In this case, it is recommended that you upgrade to Operations Sentinel level 7.3 or later, since these levels have the necessary classes and classifications predefined.