Remote Disk Health Monitor

Keep an eye on the health of disks in all your machines from one place.

RDHM consists of two programs:

• rdhm-agent – a small daemon running on every machine you want to watch. It collects SMART data (through smartctl), scans kernel logs for storage-related errors and serves the results over a simple HTTP API. It also announces itself on the local network via mDNS, so in a typical home/LAN setup no configuration is needed at all.
• rdhm-monitor – a Qt Quick desktop application which discovers agents on the network and shows the state of their disks. Agents that cannot be discovered (different subnet, VPN etc.) can be added manually. The monitor keeps a live connection to each agent, so status changes show up right away.

The agent is written in plain C++ with no Qt dependency and is meant to be light enough to run on a NAS or a headless server. It works on Linux and Windows; the monitor builds wherever Qt 6 is available (Linux, Windows and macOS are covered by CI).

Building

You will need CMake ≥ 3.16, a C++23 compiler and – for the monitor – Qt 6 (Quick, Gui, Network). On Linux the monitor additionally needs avahi client libraries for mDNS discovery.

Third party libraries are vendored as submodules, so clone recursively:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Kicer86/RemoteDiskHealthMonitor.git
cd RemoteDiskHealthMonitor
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build

Both components are built by default. If you only need one of them (say, the agent for a server), disable the other with -DBUILD_AGENT=OFF or -DBUILD_MONITOR=OFF – this also trims the list of required dependencies accordingly.

Tests can be run with ctest --test-dir build.

Running the agent

rdhm-agent --name "basement NAS"

The name (optional) is what will be shown in the monitor. The agent listens on port 1630 and needs to be able to run smartctl, which usually means root – on Linux the recommended way is the systemd unit shipped in packaging/systemd. Runtime dependencies on Linux are smartmontools and util-linux.

The API is plain HTTP, so the monitor is not the only possible consumer:

curl http://nas:1630/api/v1/status

/api/v1/info, /api/v1/disks and an SSE endpoint at /api/v1/events are also available.

Packaging

The packaging/ directory contains files for building Debian, RPM and Arch packages (separate packages for the agent and the monitor), plus the systemd service for the agent.

License

GPLv3, see LICENSE.