Event monitoring via Procurve Manager Plus

[Neil_77]

Hello,

I've recently installed the trial version of PCM+ to manage the HP Procurve 4000M and 8000M switches in our network.

I'm particularly interested in the event monitoring side of things at the moment.

I was wondering if anyone could tell me if the following is possible or has any suggestions on this side of things:

1) If I have, for example, a fan failure then fan failure events are continually sent by the switch. This fills up the Events log so can make it difficult to see other alarms. I would prefer it if I get the original alarm then simply a count of the number of times that alarm has been received (rather than multiple instances of the same event)

Is it possible to change the view settings in any way to achieve this? Or does anyone have any suggestions on the filtering side of things to help manage this kind of thing better?

2) Is there any way to increase/decrease the severity of certain alarms when they appear on the PCM+ screen? For example, I might have critical systems attached to certain ports so may want to raise the severity of certain alarms on those ports.

3) Does anyone have a list of all the events that the 4000M and 8000M are capable of sending? I have searched for this info on the HP site but without success.

Any suggestions on the above would be welcome or, indeed, any other suggestions on event management regarding HP switches.

Thanks.

[Les Ligetfalvy]

Neil,
I hear what you're saying and I too hoped for some better filtering on the PCM+ side and flood control on the switch OS side.
To that end, I posted:
PCM+ 1.5 Noobie suggestions
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=698333

SNMP Security access violation
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=703729

I don't think that I managed to bend any HP ears on the forum but I have become a bit of a thorn in the side of a few people at procurve support and have submitted several feature enhancement requests. We can only hope that PCM+ 2.0 will be an improvement and that my feature enhancement requests make their way into the switch OS.

In the meantime, I plan to manage my logs using a couple of products. Remember that there are two logs in PCM+, the syslog and the trap log. Only the trap log has alerts.
I could configure alerts on traps in PCM+ but they are limited to just emails, no paging or SMS unless you have them integrated in your email system.

I also run Whatsup Gold (WUG), and it can do much more with alerts, both from syslog and from traps, so the level of alerts that are in amongst the noise will go it it. I do not read the logs in WUG every day, relying on the defined alerts to pull what I want out of the noise.

I will reduce the level going to PCM+ to exclude informational to reduce the noise going there. With some of the OOB pains I encountered, my switches have not yet made their way from the test lab over to production but hope to deploy them soon.

[Neil_77]

Hi Les,

thanks for the response. I suppose its good to know that others are having the same issues as me but its just a pity the event filtering capabilities of PCM+ aren't a bit better!

Maybe if they see there is enough demand for it, they will implement some improvements though.

We also have WhatsUpGold but, at the moment, its purely monitoring up and down status of the boxes. But maybe I will have a bit more of a look into its event monitoring capabilities given PCM+'s deficiencies.