Experiences with Insight Online?

[lowen]

Interested to hear any and all experiences with Insight Online - HP experts standing by to answer your questions - so let us know!

[Jeff_Kevin]

I have worked with a several customers to install Insight Remote Support and Insight Online.  Unfortunately, I can’t give names, but I can describe one specific experience I had while with a customer.  We discussed the benefits of Insight Remote Support and Insight Online for a few minutes then connected to a virtual machine to install it.  They wanted to test it on a few systems during the decision period.

In just under 20 minutes Insight Remote Support was installed and linked to Insight Online.  We discovered a few systems.  While we were discussing the different options for registering the large amount of servers this customer had one of the staff left the room -- I assumed it was to get coffee but he had other things in mind :)

While he was gone we were looking at the Insight Remote Support and Insight Online consoles.  A few minutes later we started seeing alerts on the screen.  As we dug into the consoles we discovered that he had gone into the datacenter and pulled the power supply out of one machine that we had discovered and a fan from another. 

By the time he returned from the datacenter with coffee we had a case number from HP for the fan failure (about 10 minutes later).  The customer was really impressed and realized how much time they could save by not having to call support each time a hardware issue occurred.

To see how to install Insight Remote Support, please view our installation video here: Installation Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rz45gT1GCg

[romanempire]

Not good.

Trying to get an SMB client sorted out and as they have a lot of HP equipment I got them to buy Carepacks for their virtual hosts (3x DL380 G7). Trying to link recently purchased Carepacks in Insight Online but all I get is this error message:-

"This entitlement does not exist. Please review the entitlement identifier and make any necessary edits, or check the box to remove this item."

Have also previously tried to link clients other HP equipment (storage, networking) in Insight Online without success!!

Not confidence inspiring!!!

[Iain Fenwick]

When it works it works well.

when it doesnt, forget it. Hp offer no real support on this product.

i have five servers with verious problems, no connectivity, wont pick up warranty contracts and just will not intsall. i have spent days on it. One support agent said it was up to me to get the product to work, i dont have a programer on staff but was willing to get one just to get it going, but he would not supply the source code.

[Brad Cunningham]

Lain

I am sorry you are having issues. The problem you descibe appears to be with the Insight Remote Support client and not with Insight Online.

Insight Online is the "cloud " version of what the local Insight Remote Support client sees.

HP does have support for both of these products. There is a dedicated team within the solution center that supports Insight Remote Support.

Please call 1-800-633-3600 and for your shortcut say Insight Remote Support and you should be redirected to the appropriate queue.

I look forward to your update

I am an HP employee

Brad

[shocko]

I find the product extremely limited in a mid-large enviroment. I cannot seem to find a mthod of doing any of the following:

1. Create dynamic groups
2. Alert on failed discovery
3. Alert on systems without entitlement
4. Alert on systems with failed collections

[shocko]

Here's a real world example of how poorly this product performs (in my opinion) from my site over the last two weeks. I noticed on several production that amber lights were showing. Upon inspection, they had various issues, failed disks etc. I was wondering why IRS had not logged an auto-support call for these. So I checked IRS 7 and found that all my systems were showing as expired from proactive care! not good. Anyway, after manually refreshing all contract details, they now are back to showing under proactive care and things are working (kind of!). Anyway, the issue seemed to be the recent cut-over to HP enterprise. That's fine. I can live with an issue like this. My issue with IRS is the following:

• No alerts form the application itself or the cloud that the systems had expired
• No ability it seems to configure such alerts
• No command line ability to refresh all contract details leading to hours of manual work to get things back working
• No ability for the application to group machines arbitrarily so we can quickly see what systems have issues

Now, we have had various HP consultant in to set this up. none of them can offer guidance on how to address any of these issues. unless I'm missing something, this product has serious limitations in a mid to large sized organisation. A top that, today I had issues with certain gen 8/ilo4 servers not registering. This was due to iLo4 firmware and SSL issues. Again, I can live with that but when trying to discover devices I get a UI message saying that 'Discovery failed' and that's it! no detail! Again, what a joke!

As I said, if I am not taking full advantage of the prodcuts capabilites or I'm missing something please feel free to correct me :)

[toddg1]

Hi Shocko,

Thanks for your feedback about the product.  A few of these items are being considered for work

in an upcoming release.

A question for you about the notifications regarding your coverage.

Do you have the "Email Adapter" enabled in your I-RS product?  (Done from the "Administrator Settings"

page - in a tab called "integration adapters"

In this adapter, you can elect to get notifications about many things:

"Notification States"

• Case Opened (Email default and backup contacts for device)
• Case Closed (Email default and backup contacts for device)
• Collection Sent (Email default and backup contacts for device)

• Application Failure (Email default host device contact)
• Software Management Updates (Email default host device contact)
• Entitlement Expiration (Email default and backup contacts for device)
• New Device Discovered (Email default and backup contacts for device)
• Host Device Capacity Exceeds
• % of the Maximum Number of Devices (Email default host device contact)

If you notice the one that I have highlighted in "red" - you will see that you can configure I-RS to get

email when a device (or devices) are 90 days out from expiration, 60 days out, 30 days out, and 0 days out,

meaning that expiration has happened.

Please make sure that you have setup this capability, shocko, so at least this part of your concerns are 

better met.

[shocko]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, the email alert for contract expiration was not enabled so I have enabled that and it's firing so cross that off the list. However, we are currently looking at an alternate vendor to monitor our hardware as this software simply requires too much manual configuration.

We may re-visit it in the future pending the addition of some of the following features:

• Ability to create dynamic groups based on device attributes (IP address, OS, produc, entitlement etc.)
• Ability to dynamically set contact details base don device attibutes
• More fully featured command line capabilities
• Decent error message on failures such as dicovery failures

[toddg1]

shocko,

Thanks for your honest feedback.  As I suggested, all of these features are on our list of things users would

like to see - and what helps is when we hear from you that they ARE important - often when you just hear from one customer about something they would like to see, it becomes hard to prioritize.

I have now heard from these specific requests from you and several others a number of times and am passing this

information along.

Another question for you from the original post in this thread.  You said it took you several hours to input the 

new credential information and get it refreshed.

Can you expand on this (again, so that we can learn from your experience?)

Was this related to the "manual entry" of your new contract parameters, on many devices? (if so, we could

use our command line tool to export a file, where you could make these adjustments in the spreadsheet and re-import, still manual - but not nearly so tedious).

Was this related to having to ask the I-RS to refresh the entitlement for each device manually?
If so, there is a schedule - in the "Administrator Settings" that you could run manually by a couple of clicks

that will re-validate the entitlement for ALL of your devices with HP.

(This runs automatically once a month, but has the capability to be run on demand - for just such circumstances as these you have described)