User manual

Using S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitor 163
SANTOOLS® is registered in US Patent and Trademark Office No 3,107,854 All rights reserved.
If you wanted to create a comma-delimited file for importing into a spread sheet for graphing temperature
over time, then you would enter:
echo "$$S","$$V" >> TemperatureLogFile.txt
This would result in something like:
"23502232","30"
"23502292","30"
(Where first field is system time in seconds, and the second field is drive temperature). This shows the temperature
remained constant for the two readings that were taken 60 seconds apart.
D - Delete range of threshold entries
This option will display all defined events and prompt you for a starting and ending sequence number to delete. Once
you delete a range of entries, they will be re numbered so the remaining entries are contiguous and start at zero.
P -Purge ALL threshold entries (erase all defined thresholds)
This will delete all entries. Note that no changes will be made permanent until you save the configuration file. So if
you make a mistake and want to "unpurge" entries from a selected configuration file, quit the program and start over.
L - Load threshold entries from file
You will be prompted for a configuration file. If the file does not exist, the program will tell you and nothing will happen.
If the file does exist, these entries will be ADDED to the current list of entries. So, if you load a configuration file that
has 5 entries for a particular device twice, you will then have 10 entries for that same device. If you save the file and
invoke SMARTMon-UX with the -W option, each script will be invoked twice if the threshold condition is met.
W - Write threshold entries to file
This saves the entries into a file of your choice. By default, the file will be the name of the previously loaded
configuration file. If you have not loaded a configuration file, the default will be smartmonux-thresholds.cfg, in
the current directory. SMARTMon-UX will warn you if the file already exists and give you the choice whether or not to
replace the file or abort the operation.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How do I launch the action in background?
Under UNIX append the script with the "&" character. Unfortunately, Windows family operating systems do not have a
method to launch command-lines in the background. That means that the action script must complete before
SMARTMon-UX resumes polling devices.
2. How can I validate the parsing of an action script without launching it?
Traditionally, you would add the word echo to the beginning of the script. Add leading/trailing single quote to it and
send the output to a scratch file that you can view.
3. Can I poll different devices at different polling intervals?
Yes. If you poll device "A" every 60 seconds and device "B" every 10 minutes, the threshold engine will perform the
desired result properly. It will, however, have to scan all events every 60 seconds because that is the greatest
common factor between the two times. Warning, if you had set device "A" to 59 seconds, but left device "B" at the 10
minute interval, the program would have to run through the list every second. That is because the greatest common
factor of the two intervals is the number one. The downside is that this will cause additional CPU overhead between
polling periods. (The overhead is still nominal, however). SMARTMon-UX sleeps every polling period, so millions or
billions of operations could be performed between each polling interval, even if it is only one second.
4. What does the output look like?
Whatever you want it to. Look at the output below which was generated by the parameters above, described in the
View All Defined Thresholds section. We wanted to see how hot drives ran after power up. The two dumps below
represent a comparison between a Seagate ST1181677FC and a Hitachi DK31 ...
D:\smartmonux\smartmon-ux -Wdavid.cfg
(kill program after 15 minutes)