Beeks Analytics appliances are deployed on Dell PowerEdge servers equipped with Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC). iDRAC provides out-of-band hardware monitoring for server health, event logging, and alert generation for all hardware components including power supplies, fans, memory, and storage.
The most common failure is disk failure. Beeks Analytics appliances specify RAID configuration for all drives, largely eliminating the chances of a catastrophic disk failure, but external monitoring is critical to prevent gradual unchecked degradation of the RAID array that will result in eventual catastrophic failure. Refer to the Dell articles on iDRAC monitoring that are referenced in this section to ensure monitoring is in place for these critical considerations.
iDRAC alerts and notifications
iDRAC’s alerting allows proactive notification of hardware issues before they impact analytics operations.
Choose from the following alerting mechanisms:
Email (SMTP) — for direct alert delivery
SNMP traps — to external monitoring systems
Remote syslog — to centralized log aggregation
See this Dell knowledge base article for how to configure alerting rules in iDRAC, and see the list of alerts here.
Configuration
Email
To configure email alerting for system events, refer to Dell’s official guidance.SNMP traps and remote syslog
For SNMP trap forwarding and remote syslog configuration, Dell provides step-by-step instructions in their support knowledge base. Stats can be polled via SNMP, however we capture most of those internally as part of the Appliance Internal Monitoring, and these can be viewed easily in the VMX Health dashboards.