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Use Nagios to monitor for Dell systems warranty expirations

You know that here at E.S. we're big fans of monitoring. Today I saw on a mailing list a post by Erinn Looney-Triggs who wrote a module for Nagios that uses dmidecode to gather a Dell's serial number then uses their web API to determine if it is near the end of the warantee period. I think that's an excellent way to prevent what can be a nasty surprise.

Link to the code is here: Nagios module for Dell systems warranty using dmidecode (Github project here)

What unique things do you monitor for on your systems?

Posted by Tom Limoncelli in Technical Tips

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wow, excellent plugin. Thanks for the link. I've been using dmidecode for a lot of things (including the service #'s), but I didn't consider this "mashup". Great.

There's a pretty serious bug in this script that's easily fixed. The days_left variable is a string, and the warning and critical thresholds are integers. This causes the result to be falsely OK. I'm a perl guy, and know very little Python, but this works for me. On line 98, insert this line:
days_left = int(days_left)

You can test this bug by setting the -w flag to a high number of days.

Yeah that has been fixed with the new release today.

yes ... this is the Excellent way to prevent

yes ... this is the Excellent way to prevent
http://www.electrocomputerwarehouse.com

The use of the Nagios plugins with some shell scripting magic opens up many many many options to check against. At first I used basic installs then I began getting record logs from nagios to push data into ganglia and those graphs have been addicting as I now want to graph just about anything.. I guess the next question becomes how much CPU power/resources will one be willing to give up in order to monitor anything that software can monitor like nagios or ganglia, or any other software with similar measurement or alert capabilities.

There is a plugin to check the status of a Dell systems warranty using snmp, omreport or dmidecode.

I am having issues with this plugin and cannot get it to work. When i run the check_dell_warranty.py from my monitoring box, i keep on getting this errors...

/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/urllib3/connectionpool.py:769: InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised. See: https://urllib3.readthedocs.org/en/latest/security.html
InsecureRequestWarning)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./check_dell_warranty.py", line 772, in
parse_exit(RESULT, options.short_output)
File "./check_dell_warranty.py", line 606, in parse_exit
days, short_output)
File "./check_dell_warranty.py", line 569, in process_asset
days, short_output)
File "./check_dell_warranty.py", line 512, in build_warranty_line
days_left = int(days_left)
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'days_left' referenced before assignment

I recommend you file an "issue" on the github repo for the project: https://github.com/erinn/check_dell_warranty

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