DF plug-in

Using the DF plug-in of SSC Serv allows you to collect information about the usage of volumes on a server. In particular, the number of used and available bytes of each partition is reported.

SSC Serv is a native Windows service which collects system metrics periodically and sends them to a collectd server for processing and storage. No remote access to the Windows machine is required. The service is running on the Windows server and sends data, allowing the Windows server to be locked down tightly for maximum security. SSC Serv is very light-weight, integrates well with Windows and doesn't get in the way.

Collected metrics

The DF plug-in collects the utilization of volumes. This includes network shares, iSCSI LUNs and similar “logical devices”, even when they are not assigned a drive letter. The data is reported per mount point. If a partition is mounted more than once, the same data may be reported multiple times with different plugin instances. The plugin instance is set to the mount point. For drive letters, only the (uppercase) letter is used, e.g. “C”. For mounted drives, all slashes are converted to backslashes and the trailing backslash is stripped, e.g. “C:\Mounted Drive”.

The metrics are reported using the df_complex type. The type instance is set to “used" for space that is in use, “free” for space available to the user SSC Serv is running as, and “reserved” for space that is unused but not available to the user.

Registry

The DF plug-in stores its configuration in the Windows Registry under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\octo\SSC Serv\Df key. The ignorelist uses the IgnoreList subkey, which stores the selection in a REG_MULTI_SZ (list of strings) value called Selection. This list is using the unaltered mount point, i.e. the modifications mentioned above are not visible in the GUI and the registry. The Action value controls what happens to matching entries. If set to “Collect”, only matching volumes will be collected. If set to “Ignore”, all but the matching volumes will be collectd. The structure is as follows:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\octo\SSC Serv\
  Df\
    Enabled "true"
    IgnoreList/
      Selection "C:\", "C:\Mounted Drive\"
      Action    "Collect"

See also