Just finished my first Python script. It’s a Nagios plugin to check Dell hardware components via the omreport utility. It’s designed to be used client-side via NRPE (or check_by_ssh). Additional usage information can be found within the scripts docstrings as well as the --help option. Some gotchas: In some instances NRPE will not execute scripts that start with #!/usr/bin/env. In these instances you will need to specify the full path to python . The plugin expects a symlink of omreport in /usr/sbin, you may need to add one if the OMSA install script didn’t. I hard-coded the path...

Last night at work our use of OMSA and Nagios paid off (it often does). Three crucial production servers showed up in monitoring with degraded RAID5 arrays. It appears all three servers had 1 out of 3 drives in state “foreign”! I was able to quickly log in and bring the foreign disks online. Without Nagios and OMSA we would have never known and the servers would have lived on with zero redundancy until their inevitable failure. Some people may not know about Open manage so I thought I would write a quick blurb.