[Info-vax] Health monitoring disk members of HW RAID controllers?

[Rod]

I have been previously using OpenVMS Volume Shadowing (software RAID
mirroring) with OpenVMS Alpha and OpenVMS/I64.  It was possible to see
when spindle members of the shadow set were degrading and proactively
replace disks before it became an emergency repair. (SHO ERR, DECevent
utility for ERRLOG.SYS content).

I'm now moving towards deploying hardware RAID solutions for the
enhanced performance they deliver on OpenVMS/Alpha and OpenVMS/I64
systems.

OpenVMS on IA64 and (some) Alphas supports hardware RAID controllers
which package and offer RAID arrays as a single homogeneous logical
volumes thru the OS.

As near as I can tell, this hardware RAID logical volume packaging
means there is no way to monitor the state of heath of the drive
spindle members that comprise the RAID array using simple means like
SHO ERR.

I have also looked at the kind of displays available from the OpenVMS
RAID controller admin utilities (SYS$SYSTEM:MSA$UTIL for the DS15,
RX2600 SA640x, SYS$SYSTEM:SAS$UTIL for the RX2660 embedded 8 port SAS
HBA).

Those utilities don't seem to offer any drive spindle-level detail
displays that would permit advance alert monitoring for degrading
spindles.

Can someone offer a suggestion of how an OpenVMS system administrator
could perform such proactive monitoring with "available" tools that
execute under OpenVMS?  I would like to avoid services/offerings that
require close co-ordination with HP service. (I have a large installed
base of remote customer sites that I administer that span many
different HP service areas or are maintained by a 3rd party vendor).
I would also like to avoid offline/firmware-based display capabilities
as they are difficult to access on 24/7 operated remote site nodes.