Failed Disk and no Alerts in Navisphere?

Did you buy the Alerting module with the array?

Just kidding! Actually this does not make a lot of sense. I don't have a 960 (until Jan 15th) but I've got several CX4s on the floor and I've never had a problem having alerts show up for any type of failure. What version of FLARE are you running?

BTW - Welcome to the Forums community! I can see you've been here for a while, but thanks for joining in with your first post. Hopefully we can collectively get to the bottom of this issue with you.

I didn't think to ask the first time around, but did the array dial home? If so, did you mention this to the support tech who responded?

Thank you for the response.  I apologize for the delay, I took some time off for Christmas.

My FLARE is 4.29.000.5.003.

Far as I can tell, the CLARiiON did not call home.  I have my email address in the CC section of the call home template and did not receive anything.  I do receive the test emails when I initiate them from the template.  Should EMC respond to the tests?  They never have.  So I’m left wondering if EMC gets any email from my CLARiiON.  I verified in Exchange that the test emails to emailalert@emc.com do indeed go out.

About the bad drive, when I go into Navisphere everything looks good.  The alert window is empty and no warning icons on the CX4960.  However, if I drill down into Physical, Bus Enclosure, Disks, I immediately get a purple “R” with a circle next to the bad disk.  This also triggers a red triangle with an “!” in it to be overlaid on the “Disks”, “Bus Enclosure”, “physical” and all the way up to the “Storage Domains”. And it stays lit up like a Christmas tree until I logout and log back in.

The DAE has no RAID groups assigned to it yet and all the drives are unallocated.  Maybe this is why the bad drive was automatically removed. My guess is that when a non-used drive is automatically removed due to failure it does not trigger an alert?  Just an ugly discomforting bright orange light on the drive.  I could test my theory buy carving out a test LUN then manually removing a drive and see if I get an Alert.

Any thoughts?

As you have noticed, I am new here.  So please forgive my ignorance.  I’ve signed myself up for a couple week long CLARiiON training classes in Irvine CA next month.  I figure it’s about time.  I’ve never had any CLARiiON classes. And this CX4960 is slightly different than my CX700.

Thank you.

I did some digging but could not come up with confirmation of your theory about the lack of alert because the drive was unused. I'm sure I remember seeing something like that somewhere, but I can't seem to find it now. Maybe someone else can confirm or deny that theory, but it does make some sense.

If you don't get an error before your course next month, you can grill your instructor and see how good they are :-) Hopefully you get a better one than I had (many years ago on the FC4700-2). The training materials were full of mistakes at the time and the instructor would start us on a lab and then leave for 30-40 minutes while we struggled through the faulty procedures *lol*  I've taken several EMC courses since then and they have been significantly better though, so I wouldn't worry too much.

As for being new here, there is no need to ask forgivenes for any percieved ignorance. Most of the folks around here started out asking lots of questions, and over time you will (hopefully) start answering some of the questions from the "new" new folks. Most of the people who have been around for a long time are still asking questions as well, as there is just too much to know about these systems for any one person to know it all. This community gives us all the opportunity to brainstorm, bounce ideas off each other, and occasionally plead for help :-)

WOW. That is exactly what I experienced.  I guess there is something to be said about reading the “release notes”.    It’s nice to know that it is not dysfunctional.

Thank you very much.

When I was looking for this I skipped right over the FLARE release notes. I checked the Navisphere admin guides and did couple of searches on the Knowledge Base.

Thanks for digging this up!

To your question if EMC should respond to your test events, EMC does. If you have email home or dial home configured right, each test even actually generates an SR which is fed in to the SR database. The only quirk is that no engineer is ever alerted of it because the system, knowing that it was a test event, would cancel the SR immediately.

You can actually get in touch with most accessible EMC field engineer and ask him to check the EMC SR database and confirm if your test event has been logged. Field personnel use this method quite effectively to verify if alerting systems are operational.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

-joji

Perfecto! That should be the easiest way. It is always a good practice to check alerting systems from time to time.

Cheers,

-joji