Empty Product Name in HP SIM 5

[Steve Giordano]

I'm seeing my server count going up and down from day to day. What's happening is the "Product Name" field for servers that I have discovered is blank. Not sure what process kicks off but then it comes back. I went from 268 servers yesterday to 318 today (the correct number). Has anyone else experienced this problem in 5.0? Running version 5.0 with SP2.

[Rob Buxton]

My VMWare based Servers disappear. They seem to drop off when my Historical Data Collection task runs, which, for me, is daily.

Is it the same Servers that become unknown? possibly on slow links?

[Steve Giordano]

No -- it's random. It can be servers on different subnets or servers on the same subnet so I don't think it's a slow connection issue. Maybe the servers that have to route through a FW but it's happening to servers on the same subnet.

[Rob Buxton]

Do you just use SNMP for the identification or do you use the WBEM credentials?

I believe there may still be an issue with WBEM, that's why my Virtual Servers are affected and not those that have the agents and SNMP.

I've also found that my Global SNMP credentials as configured in HPSIM get reset back to the default public and private. I've not yet found the trigger for this, but that also impacts my discovery and identification as the majrity of my Servers do not have the default public and private community names.

[Steve Giordano]

WBEM is enabled with 3 levels of usernames and passwords to use. Two levels of domain accounts that are admins on each server and one local account that's used in our Secure Zones. I haven't seen the issues with SNMP though that you're seeing.

[Stefan Laemmer]

Steve,
the only thing that worked for me was to set the SSH field in the System Properties with an account that has access to the server(s). Options->Protocol Settings..->System Protocol Settings-> All Systems->SSH Settings.. I used a domain account that has full admin rights on the servers. After a day (and the ID tasks) it seems to work and ID them ok again. And i dont use SSH anywhere but on that one field.. Good luck.

-Stefan

[Steve Giordano]

No good. I did what you said but still does it. It seems to happen whenever the Device Identification taks runs. According to the docs this task will identify (among other things) Product Type. I changed it from running daily to running every 5 days. Not sure what the disadvantages would be to doing that but we'll see. I'm wondering if we get in the habit of putting service in maintenance mode before doing work then the tasks that fire after a server is taken out of maintenance mode will be enough to keep our data updated. Looked like the information the Daily Identification task collects is pretty static unless you're doing an upgrade (software,HW) or changing settings. I'm thinking if this type of work is being done we'll put servers in maint mode so when they're taken out similar tasks will run once they're online to update that information (software update task etc). How does that sound? We'll see after 5 days what happens though. I'm trying to find a way around this problem -- it's throwing off my numbers of how our environment breaks down. Mgmt likes to see this type of infomation.

[Rob Buxton]

Steve,
I've a similar issue and the Daily Device Identification task may be the culprit.

Note that if you have a Discovery run (check under options->discovery) scheduled on a regular basis then that will also do a device identification. Mine were running at similar times so I've just disabled the daily device identification task and I'm going to see what the results are like.
I'll let you know if there's any progress after the weekend.

[Steve Giordano]

OK -- good to know. Yes I do have a discovery running every 6 hours for our ILO network. Another problem is many of our servers that have the ILO discovered will lose it's "green check mark" in SIM under the MP column. The only way around that was to do a Discovery Task every 6 hours. This was a problem in 4.2 as well. I'll do the same -- disable that task from running and see how it goes.

[Steve Giordano]

Well I was working fine until my scheduled tasks "Bi-Weekly Data Collection" and "Device Identification" ran. Now I have 109 of my 317 servers with a Product Name of either "Unamanaged" or "Unknown." I've disabled these tasks until there's a fix to this problem. This is causing us a lot of issues with our monnitoring.