Handling Customer Requests for Proactive Health Check on PowerMax Array

While Dell Technologies understands requests made by Customers to Dell Technologies Support to perform Proactive Health Checks on their PowerMax arrays, Dell Technologies do not recommend this practice when there is no specific technical reason to perform the Health Check.

Below are some factual pointers which may help understanding of why these proactive health checks by Dell Technologies Support personnel are not recommended practice:

• The general recommendation is to allow the array to call home upon detecting an issue, after which Dell Technologies Support TSE connects, and identifies the issue through normal troubleshooting, including the running of a Health Check.
   
• There are already several proactive tasks running 24 x 7 in the background in a PowerMax array, which check system health automatically and automatically generate a call home alert if something needs attention.
   
• Ideally, Dell Technologies Support aim to limit the amount of time we are remotely connected to an array as an active connection can suppress call home events.
  Dell Technologies do not want this suppression of such call home events.

PowerMax health:
If you need to proactively monitor your array, you can review system health via Unisphere /Cloud IQ at any time negating the need to dial in remotely.

The following KB article describes how to perform the Healthcheck from Unisphere/Cloud IQ
Article 000197729 : https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-in/000197729/how-to-run-a-health-check-on-vmax3-powermax-from-unisphere-for-vmax-powermax

Furthermore, from the Solutions Enabler command line interface, these are some SymmCLI commands which can also be used:

symcfg -sid <xxxx> list -env_data -service_state failed

(Displays all the failed physical components in symmetrix array <xxxx>)

symcfg -sid <xxxx> list -dir all

(Displays the online status of all directors ( Frontend and Backend).)

symdisk -sid <xxxx> list -failed

(Lists all the failed drives in array <xxxx>)

symevent -sid <xxxx> list

(Lists all the events happened such as informational, warnings, errors and fatal on array <xxxx>.)

Issues found with Healthcheck:

If any issues are found when you run the Health Check (or SymmCLI commands), please open a Dell Technologies Service Request with the details of the failed health check, and Dell Technologies Support will happily troubleshoot your issue.