Linux – Email when Linux server disk is full

disk-space-utilizationlinuxmonitoring

How can I set up an email notification on a Linux server for when a disk/volume exceeds a certain usage quota?

Best Answer

Option 1:
Write a script that runs df, parses the output for the percent utilization & sends an email when it exceeds a given threshold, then run this script from cron.
(If you're feeling lazy you can find a bunch of pre-written scripts by asking The Knower of All Things for Unix Disk space check script.)

Option 2 (The better solution):
Deploy a monitoring system (Nagios, InterMapper, OpenNMS, etc. -- look around here for lots of suggestions & opinions), and configure it to send you a notification when your disks are filling up. While you're at it configure alerts for other stuff you might be concerned about :-)

Related Solutions

Linux – How to monitor hard disk load on Linux

You can get a pretty good measure of this using the iostat tool.

% iostat -dx /dev/sda 5

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s   rsec/s   wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util
sda               0.78    11.03    1.19    2.82    72.98   111.07    45.80     0.13   32.78   1.60   0.64

The disk utilisation is listed in the last column. This is defined as

Percentage of CPU time during which I/O requests were issued to the device (band-width utilization for the device). Device saturation occurs when this value is close to 100%.

Linux – Disk full, du tells different. How to further investigate

Check for files on located under mount points. Frequently if you mount a directory (say a sambafs) onto a filesystem that already had a file or directories under it, you lose the ability to see those files, but they're still consuming space on the underlying disk. I've had file copies while in single user mode dump files into directories that I couldn't see except in single usermode (due to other directory systems being mounted on top of them).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – How to monitor hard disk load on Linux

Linux – Disk full, du tells different. How to further investigate

Related Topic