If you are using our Software RAID Monitoring then you have probably already noticed that you can configure two different types of warnings under this section:
You can select to be warned when RAID health is not ideal or when the RAID health is critical.
In this article we’ll go through what each of these warnings mean.
RAID health is not ideal
This warning will include cases such as when the RAID is performing a check, recover, or resync. In these cases the health of the RAID is most likely healthy, however the healthy status cannot be currently confirmed because your system is either checking up on the RAID integrity with the ‘check’ status, or resyncing the RAID drives with the ‘resync’ status, or rebuilding/recovering the RAID with the ‘recover’ status. Either one of these statuses can have a faulty outcome, so the RAID status is currently ‘not ideal’.
We’ve included this under the ‘not ideal’ health because under such conditions the ‘healthy’ status cannot be 100% confirmed. Furthermore when such actions (as described above) are performed on the RAID disks, your server may even experience slower than usual performance.
So, if you’d like to be warned of such scenarios, then select to be warned when RAID health is ‘not ideal’, but this warning level should be considered informative, as you are most likely not taking any action at this stage.
Please note that such actions on the RAID setup might be routinely performed by your system, so you might get warned too often in some cases.
RAID health is critical
This is the warning level that you’d want if you wish to be warned only in extreme cases, where the RAID setup is actually failing, or has already failed.
In these cases your RAID setup requires your immediate attention in order to solve the issues that it is presenting, in order to avoid any possible data loss.