scrutiny

WebUI for smartd S.M.A.R.T monitoring

[!NOTE] Scrutiny is a Work-in-Progress and still has some rough edges.

Introduction

If you run a server with more than a couple of hard drives, you're probably already familiar with S.M.A.R.T and the smartd daemon. If not, it's an incredible open source project described as the following:

smartd is a daemon that monitors the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system built into many ATA, IDE and SCSI-3 hard drives. The purpose of SMART is to monitor the reliability of the hard drive and predict drive failures, and to carry out different types of drive self-tests.

These S.M.A.R.T hard drive self-tests can help you detect and replace failing hard drives before they cause permanent data loss. However, there's a couple issues with smartd:

• There are more than a hundred S.M.A.R.T attributes, however smartd does not differentiate between critical and informational metrics
• smartd does not record S.M.A.R.T attribute history, so it can be hard to determine if an attribute is degrading slowly over time.
• S.M.A.R.T attribute thresholds are set by the manufacturer. In some cases these thresholds are unset, or are so high that they can only be used to confirm a failed drive, rather than detecting a drive about to fail.
• smartd is a command line only tool. For head-less servers a web UI would be more valuable.

Scrutiny is a Hard Drive Health Dashboard & Monitoring solution, merging manufacturer provided S.M.A.R.T metrics with real-world failure rates.

Features

Scrutiny is a simple but focused application, with a couple of core features:

• Web UI Dashboard - focused on Critical metrics
• smartd integration (no re-inventing the wheel)
• Auto-detection of all connected hard-drives
• S.M.A.R.T metric tracking for historical trends
• Customized thresholds using real world failure rates
• Temperature tracking
• Provided as an all-in-one Docker image (but can be installed manually)
• Configurable Alerting/Notifications via Webhooks
• (Future) Hard Drive performance testing & tracking

Getting Started

RAID/Virtual Drives

Scrutiny uses smartctl --scan to detect devices/drives.

• All RAID controllers supported by smartctl are automatically supported by Scrutiny.
  • While some RAID controllers support passing through the underlying SMART data to smartctl others do not.
  • In some cases --scan does not correctly detect the device type, returning incomplete SMART data. Scrutiny supports overriding detected device type via the config file: see example.collector.yaml
• If you use docker, you must pass through the RAID virtual disk to the container using --device (see below)
  • This device may be in /dev/* or /dev/bus/*.
  • If you're unsure, run smartctl --scan on your host, and pass all listed devices to the container.

See docs/TROUBLESHOOTING_DEVICE_COLLECTOR.md for help

Docker

[!IMPORTANT] Using latest- tags is dangerous as it can update your image without warning. It is a best practice to pin a specific version. scrutiny pushes releases with semver tags, so you can use tags like v0.9.3-omnibus, v0.9-web, v0-collector, etc. For a list of all image tags see scrutiny package versions

If you're using Docker, getting started is as simple as running the following command:

See docker/example.omnibus.docker-compose.yml for a docker-compose file.

docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 8086:8086 --restart unless-stopped \
  -v `pwd`/scrutiny:/opt/scrutiny/config \
  -v `pwd`/influxdb2:/opt/scrutiny/influxdb \
  -v /run/udev:/run/udev:ro \
  --cap-add SYS_RAWIO \
  --device=/dev/sda \
  --device=/dev/sdb \
  --name scrutiny \
  ghcr.io/analogj/scrutiny:latest-omnibus

• /run/udev is necessary to provide the Scrutiny collector with access to your device metadata
• --cap-add SYS_RAWIO is necessary to allow smartctl permission to query your device SMART data
  • NOTE: If you have NVMe drives, you must add --cap-add SYS_ADMIN as well. See issue #26
• --device entries are required to ensure that your hard disk devices are accessible within the container.
• ghcr.io/analogj/scrutiny:latest-omnibus is a omnibus image, containing both the webapp server (frontend & api) as well as the S.M.A.R.T metric collector. (see below)

Hub/Spoke Deployment

In addition to the Omnibus image (available under the latest tag) you can deploy in Hub/Spoke mode, which requires 3 other Docker images:

• ghcr.io/analogj/scrutiny:latest-collector - Contains the Scrutiny data collector, smartctl binary and cron-like scheduler. You can run one collector on each server.
• ghcr.io/analogj/scrutiny:latest-web - Contains the Web UI and API. Only one container necessary
• influxdb:2.8 - InfluxDB image, used by the Web container to persist SMART data. Only one container necessary See docs/TROUBLESHOOTING_INFLUXDB.md

See docker/example.hubspoke.docker-compose.yml for a docker-compose file.

docker run -p 8086:8086 --restart unless-stopped \
  -v `pwd`/influxdb2:/var/lib/influxdb2 \
  --name scrutiny-influxdb \
  influxdb:2.8

docker run -p 8080:8080 --restart unless-stopped \
  -v `pwd`/scrutiny:/opt/scrutiny/config \
  --name scrutiny-web \
  ghcr.io/analogj/scrutiny:latest-web

docker run --restart unless-stopped \
  -v /run/udev:/run/udev:ro \
  --cap-add SYS_RAWIO \
  --device=/dev/sda \
  --device=/dev/sdb \
  -e COLLECTOR_API_ENDPOINT=http://SCRUTINY_WEB_IPADDRESS:8080 \
  --name scrutiny-collector \
  ghcr.io/analogj/scrutiny:latest-collector

Hub rootless installation using Podman Quadlets

See docs/INSTALL_ROOTLESS_PODMAN.md for instructions.

Manual Installation (without-Docker)

While the easiest way to get started with Scrutiny is using Docker, it is possible to run it manually without much work. You can even mix and match, using Docker for one component and a manual installation for the other.

See docs/INSTALL_MANUAL.md for instructions.

Usage

Once scrutiny is running, you can open your browser to http://localhost:8080 and take a look at the dashboard.

If you're using the omnibus image, the collector should already have run, and your dashboard should be populate with every drive that Scrutiny detected. The collector is configured to run once a day, but you can trigger it manually by running the command below.

For users of the docker Hub/Spoke deployment or manual install: initially the dashboard will be empty. After the first collector run, you'll be greeted with a list of all your hard drives and their current smart status.

docker exec scrutiny /opt/scrutiny/bin/scrutiny-collector-metrics run

Configuration

By default Scrutiny looks for its YAML configuration files in /opt/scrutiny/config

There are two configuration files available:

• Webapp/API config via scrutiny.yaml - example.scrutiny.yaml.
• Collector config via collector.yaml - example.collector.yaml.

Neither file is required, however if provided, it allows you to configure how Scrutiny functions.

Cron Schedule

Unfortunately the Cron schedule cannot be configured via the collector.yaml (as the collector binary needs to be trigged by a scheduler/cron). However, if you are using the official ghcr.io/analogj/scrutiny:latest-collector or ghcr.io/analogj/scrutiny:latest-omnibus docker images, you can use the COLLECTOR_CRON_SCHEDULE environmental variable to override the default cron schedule (daily @ midnight - 0 0 * * *).

docker run -e COLLECTOR_CRON_SCHEDULE="0 0 * * *" ...

Notifications

Scrutiny supports sending SMART device failure notifications via the following services:

• Custom Script (data provided via environmental variables)
• Email
• Webhooks
• Discord
• Gotify
• Hangouts
• IFTTT
• Join
• Mattermost
• ntfy
• Pushbullet
• Pushover
• Slack
• Teams
• Telegram
• Tulip

Check the notify.urls section of example.scrutiny.yml for examples.

For more information and troubleshooting, see the TROUBLESHOOTING_NOTIFICATIONS.md file

Collector Errors

Scrutiny will also notify you if the collector is unable to run smartctl successfully, preventing it from reporting data. This is on by default. The global setting in collector.yaml also covers smartctl --scan and devices that failed before registering with Scrutiny:

notify:
  on_smartctl_error: true

scrutiny.yaml has the same setting, for all devices or one device in the devices section, keyed by its scrutiny_uuid. The device's setting takes priority:

notify:
  on_smartctl_error: true
devices:
  - scrutiny_uuid: 9a4d34b5-b2ee-51ef-8506-90eea09be417
    notifications:
      on_smartctl_error: false

A drive that -n/--nocheck found in a low power mode is not a failure, and is never reported.

Missed Uploads

Scrutiny will also notify you when a device stops uploading data. This is on for every device, and can be configured globally in notify, or per device in the devices section of scrutiny.yaml, which takes priority. A device's scrutiny_uuid is the last part of its details page URL.

notify:
  on_missed_upload: true # optional, default true
  upload_period: 24h     # optional, default 0 (estimate)
devices:
  - scrutiny_uuid: 9a4d34b5-b2ee-51ef-8506-90eea09be417
    notifications:
      on_missed_upload: true # optional, default notify.on_missed_upload
      upload_period: 0       # optional, default notify.upload_period

A notification is sent when the next upload is more than 10% later than upload_period. When upload_period is 0, Scrutiny uses the average time between the device's last 3 uploads. If those intervals differ by more than 10%, it logs a warning and waits for them to settle before notifying. Scrutiny saves the estimated period, and uses it again after a restart unless upload_period is not 0. Drives that -n/--nocheck skips in a low power mode don't upload, so set on_missed_upload: false for them.

Disabling Notifications for a Device

Set notifications.disabled: true on a device in the devices section of scrutiny.yaml to stop all of its notifications (SMART failures, collector errors and missed uploads). Default false.

devices:
  - scrutiny_uuid: 9a4d34b5-b2ee-51ef-8506-90eea09be417
    notifications:
      disabled: true

Testing Notifications

You can test that your notifications are configured correctly by posting an empty payload to the notifications health check API.

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/health/notify

Debug mode & Log Files

Scrutiny provides various methods to change the log level to debug and generate log files.

Web Server/API

You can use environmental variables to enable debug logging and/or log files for the web server:

DEBUG=true
SCRUTINY_LOG_FILE=/tmp/web.log

You can configure the log level and log file in the config file:

log:
  file: '/tmp/web.log'
  level: DEBUG

Or if you're not using docker, you can pass CLI arguments to the web server during startup:

scrutiny start --debug --log-file /tmp/web.log

Collector

You can use environmental variables to enable debug logging and/or log files for the collector:

DEBUG=true
COLLECTOR_LOG_FILE=/tmp/collector.log

Or if you're not using docker, you can pass CLI arguments to the collector during startup:

scrutiny-collector-metrics run --debug --log-file /tmp/collector.log

Supported Architectures

Architecture Name	Binaries	Docker
linux-amd64	:white_check_mark:	:white_check_mark:
linux-arm-5	:white_check_mark:
linux-arm-6	:white_check_mark:
linux-arm-7	:white_check_mark:	web/collector only. see #236
linux-arm64	:white_check_mark:	:white_check_mark:
freebsd-amd64	:white_check_mark:
macos-amd64	:white_check_mark:	:white_check_mark:
macos-arm64	:white_check_mark:	:white_check_mark:
windows-amd64	:white_check_mark:	WIP, see #15
windows-arm64	:white_check_mark:

Contributing

Please see the CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions for how to develop and contribute to the scrutiny codebase.

Work your magic and then submit a pull request. We love pull requests!

If you find the documentation lacking, help us out and update this README.md. If you don't have the time to work on Scrutiny, but found something we should know about, please submit an issue.

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

Authors

• Jason Kulatunga - Initial Development - @AnalogJ
• Aram Akhavan - Maintenence - @kaysond

Licenses

• MIT
• Logo: Glasses by matias porta lezcano

Sponsors

Scrutiny is only possible with the help of my Github Sponsors.

They read a simple reddit announcement post and decided to trust & finance a developer they've never met. It's an exciting and incredibly humbling experience.

If you found Scrutiny valuable, please consider supporting my work