Scrutiny is a (currently) closed source SMART hard drive monitoring tool with a pretty web interface and integration with Backblazes' excellent quarterly stats.

Ain't that the prettiest SMART monitoring tool you ever saw?

Where to find it

The author of this tool, analogj is currently trying to solicit sponsors on Github. If he makes it to 25 backers, then he will open source the project. This is a unique approach to monetization I guess, and I hope it works because the app itself has the potential to really improve disk management for DIY NAS builders like me.

There is a long thread on reddit where you can find more information about sponsoring the project.

In exchange for publicising the app analogj gave me access without sponsorship. In other words, my contribution was raising awareness through this article and the Self-Hosted podcast.

The App Itself

At first I was greeted with an error message telling me I had no stats and should run scrutiny-collector-metrics run. So, I ran docker exec -it scrutiny scrutiny-collector-metrics run and I was off to the races.

After this, the app just works. It does exactly what you'd expect and nothing more. But what is particularly exciting is that the app has been written with a hub and spoke model in mind. For example you can run one collector on each device you have with hard drives in it and then one central API server to collect those metrics. Kind of like Prometheus and node_exporter.

I particularly like the detailed stats page for each drive when you click on view details for a specific drive. For example:

Clicking on Show all attributes shows more information than you probably need. This page is generated using the same SMART stats you can view with smartctl -a /dev/sdX but obviously presents them nicely.

Feature requests

I have a few:

  • A disk stress feature for burning in new drives
  • The ability to import my years worth of influxdb / telegraf hdd temp data into the app
  • The ability to schedule regular smart checks via smartd from the UI
  • Alerting via something like apprise

Conclusion

This app has so much potential and I really hope that we can as a community come together and help make it happen.

Overall, we're off to an excellent start. Please consider contributing if you're curious and want to see it succeed using the Github sponsors initiative. It would be great to keep analogj motivated.