How do you monitor the health of a mirrored disk in Windows?

I had the same question a while ago. The first thing I thought of was using WMI, but for some weird reason, WMI doesn't expose the health of a RAID volume through any of the normal Win32_* classes.

I eventually stumbled across the script in this article and made a few modifications to suit my requirements. It parses the output of diskpart.exe's "LIST VOLUME" command. This may seem a little dirty and ugly, but right now its the best option I've seen.

The script as it appears on the linked page is ready to be used with Nagios / NSClient++. If you know a bit of VBScript it's easy enough to modify this to send e-mail instead of printing status information.

If you don't know VBScript, I'll gladly give you a modified version which will do whatever you want it to.

for /f "tokens=4,9 delims= " %a IN ('echo list volume ^| diskpart ^| find "SSD"') do echo %a %b

Replace find "SSD" with "mirror"(or stripe... whatever) or your volume name. (my volumes are named SSD1 + SSD2)

Stick in a batch file with @echo off and ur done. :)

@echo off
for /f "tokens=4,9 delims= " %%a IN ('echo list volume ^| diskpart ^| find "SSD"') do echo %%a %%b

Above line is needed for batch. =)

Notes

• You need to have a volume name for this to work, else change tokens to tokens=8

I use this ugly batch file to monitor more than one hundred servers to check mirror status and the result is lovely. It is a nsclient++ client plugin to do passive check every four hour to send result to nagios server.

check_mirror.bat

@echo off
echo list volume | diskpart | find "Mirror" > H
for /f %%i in ('type H ^| find /c "Mirror"') do set /a M=%%i 
for /f %%i in ('type H ^| find "Mirror" ^| find /c "Health" ') do set /a H=%%i 
for /f %%i in ('type H ^| find /c "Risk"') do set /a risk=%%i 
@del H /q
rem echo M=%M%, H = %H% Risk=%risk%
if %risk% GTR 0 goto err
IF %M%.==0. goto nomirror
IF %M% EQU %H% goto mirrorok

:err
echo CRITICAL: Something Wrong.
exit /B 1

:mirrorok
echo OK: Mirror Health.
exit /B 0

:nomirror
echo OK: No Mirror Found.
exit /B 1

Smartmontools (http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki) has a windows version, but I don't know it runs on 2K8

Here is a Powershell script to monitor the health of RAID arrays on Windows from https://gist.github.com/schakko at https://gist.github.com/schakko/4713248

I tested it on a Windows 10 software raid and a Dell PERC H700 hardware raid on Server 2016. Worked well. We use MegaRaid for notifications.

I'm reproducing it here just in case the Gist goes away, like the target on the accepted answer https://serverfault.com/a/150089/2985

The "Fehlerfre" and "Fehlerhaf" in the script are German translations for result codes.

# A simple PowerShell script for retrieving the RAID status of volumes with help of diskpart.
# The nicer solution would be using WMI (which does not contain the RAID status in the Status field of Win32_DiskDrive, Win32_LogicalDisk or Win32_Volume for unknown reason)
# or using the new PowerShell API introduced with Windows 8 (wrong target system as our customer uses a Windows 7 architecture).
# 
# diskpart requires administrative privileges so this script must be executed under an administrative account if it is executed standalone.
# check_mk has this privileges and therefore this script must only be copied to your check_mk/plugins directory and you are done.
#
# Christopher Klein <ckl[at]neos-it[dot]de>
# This script is distributed under the GPL v2 license.

$dp = "list volume" | diskpart | ? { $_ -match "^  [^-]" }

echo `<`<`<local`>`>`>
foreach ($row in $dp) {
    # skip first line
    if (!$row.Contains("Volume ###")) {
        # best match RegExp from http://www.eventlogblog.com/blog/2012/02/how-to-make-the-windows-softwa.html
        if ($row -match "\s\s(Volume\s\d)\s+([A-Z])\s+(.*)\s\s(NTFS|FAT)\s+(Mirror|RAID-5|Stripe|Spiegel|Spiegelung|Übergreifend|Spanned)\s+(\d+)\s+(..)\s\s([A-Za-z]*\s?[A-Za-z]*)(\s\s)*.*")  {
            $disk = $matches[2] 
            # 0 = OK, 1 = WARNING, 2 = CRITICAL
            $statusCode = 1
            $status = "WARNING"
            $text = "Could not parse line: $row"
            $line = $row
            
            if ($line -match "Fehlerfre |OK|Healthy") {
                $statusText = "is healthy"
                $statusCode = 0
                $status = "OK"
            }
            elseif ($line -match "Rebuild") {
                $statusText = "is rebuilding"
                $statusCode = 1
            }
            elseif ($line -match "Failed|At Risk|Fehlerhaf") {
                $statusText = "failed"
                $statusCode = 2
                $status = "CRITICAL"
            }
        
            echo "$statusCode microsoft_software_raid - $status - Software RAID on disk ${disk}:\ $statusText"
        }
    }
}

This version from https://gist.github.com/LionRelaxe also emails error results (https://gist.github.com/schakko/4713248#gistcomment-2256715)

# A simple PowerShell script for retrieving the RAID status of volumes with help of diskpart.
# The nicer solution would be using WMI (which does not contain the RAID status in the Status field of Win32_DiskDrive, Win32_LogicalDisk or Win32_Volume for unknown reason)
# or using the new PowerShell API introduced with Windows 8 (wrong target system as our customer uses a Windows 7 architecture).
# 
# diskpart requires administrative privileges so this script must be executed under an administrative account if it is executed standalone.
# check_mk has this privileges and therefore this script must only be copied to your check_mk/plugins directory and you are done.
#
# Christopher Klein <ckl[at]neos-it[dot]de>
# This script is distributed under the GPL v2 license.

#Volumes:
$dpV = "list volume" | diskpart | ? { $_ -match "^  [^-]" }
foreach ($row in $dpV) {
    $OutString = $OutString+$row+"`r`n"
    # skip first line
    if (!$row.Contains("Volume ###")) {
        # best match RegExp from http://www.eventlogblog.com/blog/2012/02/how-to-make-the-windows-softwa.html
        if ($row -match "\s\s(Volume\s\d)\s+([A-Z])\s+(.*)\s\s(NTFS|FAT)\s+(Mirror|RAID-5|Stripe|Spiegel|Spiegelung|Übergreifend|Spanned)\s+(\d+)\s+(..)\s\s([A-Za-z]*\s?[A-Za-z]*)(\s\s)*.*")  {
            $disk = $matches[2] 
            # 0 = OK, 1 = WARNING, 2 = CRITICAL
            $statusCode = 1
            $status = "WARNING"
            $text = "Could not parse line: $row"
            $line = $row
            
            if ($line -match "Fehlerfre |OK|Healthy") {
                $statusText = "is healthy"
                $statusCode = 0
                $status = "OK"
            }
            elseif ($line -match "Rebuild") {
                $statusText = "is rebuilding"
                $statusCode = 1
                $VolumeErrorFound = 1
            }
            elseif ($line -match "Failed|At Risk|Fehlerhaf") {
                $statusText = "failed"
                $statusCode = 2
                $status = "CRITICAL"
                $VolumeErrorFound = 1
            }
        
            #echo "$statusCode microsoft_software_raid - $status - Software RAID on disk ${disk}:\ $statusText"
        }
    }
}
$OutString = $OutString+"`r`n"

#Disk:
$dpD = "list disk" | diskpart | ? { $_ -match "^  [^-]" }
foreach ($row in $dpD) {
    # skip first line
    if (!$row.Contains("Volume ###")) {
        $OutString = $OutString+$row+"`r`n"
        # best match RegExp from http://www.eventlogblog.com/blog/2012/02/how-to-make-the-windows-softwa.html
        if ($row -match "Errors") {
            #echo "$row"
            $DiskErrorFound = 1
        }
    }
}
if (($DiskErrorFound) -Or ($VolumeErrorFound)) {
    $SMTPServer = "your.smtp.server"
    $SMTPPort = 25
    $EmailTo = "[email protected]"
    $EmailFrom = "[email protected]"
    $EmailSubject = "Disk or Volume Error on $env:computername"
    $EmailBody = $OutString
    Send-MailMessage -To $EmailTo -From $EmailFrom -Subject $EmailSubject -Body $EmailBody -SmtpServer $SMTPServer -Port $SMTPPort
}

while all of these answers will get you the status, none of them are the correct answer.

in an enterprise environment, you should be using enterprise-grade server and network monitoring tools. pretty much all of the monitoring tools i have used automatically monitor the health of any supported RAID array, software or hardware. they also monitor other things that you should be aware of, such as temperature, free disk space, etc. do you really want to create a custom script for every possible thing that needs to be monitored?

do yourself a favor and skip all this shoe-string and bubble-gum stuff and use the right tool.