I firstly want to acknowledge the work of Mark Round and Linux iostat monitoring with Cacti. The following work was inspired and based on the ideas found in Mark’s post.
My main objective when I started looking into disk monitoring was to get some similar stats into Cacti for Linux that can be found with the Windows PerfMon utility. I found Mark’s post and didn’t quite like the way it used cron to collect its statistics, and wanted something that I could easily add to snmpd.conf without needing to change much more. I was also keen on obtaining the mount point data for each partition as looking at “cciss/c0d0p3” doesn’t mean as much to management (and sometimes to me) and hopefully “/home” does.