Drive failures are a matter of when, not if. The good news is that most modern drives warn you before they fail, using S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). The challenge is collecting that data across a fleet and making it actionable. The new inventory-smartctl module makes this straightforward with a single cfbs add.
Once installed, the module auto-detects all storage devices, caches their SMART data, and exposes it as inventory attributes in Mission Portal.
This series of blogs, Monthly Module Mondays , started on April Fool’s Day 2024 discussing how to Inventory and remediate Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) has now reached the 10th installment showcasing a couple of modules to take stock of what services are running on your systems.
Command line tools are useful! Thanks to both systemd and Windows Services command line tools systemctl and Powershell’s Get-Service supporting output of json format lists of running services it is easy to bring together the power of CFEngine to run commands, read json files and collect inventory which can be used for many purposes such as: reporting, alert widgets, compliance reports as well as our new Groups feature.
