Basic monitoring of hard drive failure on Proliant servers

[Derek Bannard]

I have never used HP SIM, but have spent the better part of the last week readig the manuals and playing with the software.

So far, I've been able to add servers, but haven't been able to do any monitoring of them.

I can't find anything that tells me how to setup monitoring for an event like a failed hard drive.

The main reason we are using HP SIM is to alert us if some piece of hardware fails in our Proliant servers.  I can't seem to find how to do this.

Can someone please help with how to set this up?

Using an HP SIM 7.1 base install with the latest patch and an SQL Express database on the same server.

Thanks in advance,

Derek

[J_N_Rhodes]

Derek Bannard - Yes, HP SIM is primarily used for monitoring hardware faults on HP servers & devices

You need to look into:

HP Systems Insight Manager 7.1 Installation and Configuration Guide for Microsoft Windows (If running HP SIM on Windows)

http://kmcs-service.austin.hp.com/km-ext/kmcsdirect/emr_na-c03345274-2.pdf

&

HP Systems Insight Manager 7.1 Technical Reference Guide
http://h20628.www2.hp.com/km-ext/kmcsdirect/emr_na-c03380027-1.pdf

Hope this helps.
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[Derek Bannard]

I have looked through both documents and cannot find where it shows how to setup hard drive failure monitoring and reporting.

In case I missed it, can you point to a specific place in the documents that I can reference?

[LGentile]

Derek,

You have some homework to do about monitoring in general with HP products, I feel.  I can provide a very brief list of requirements for you, however.  the following is the basics for a Windows server.

To get events properly from an HP server, you basically need the following:

(SIM = SIM server/CMS, host = remote client/server/whatever)

- SNMP configured on the host with an agreed upon SNMP community name (at least read only).  SNMP must be configured to send traps to your SIM server via name, IP address or a DNS alias (suggested for large enviroments).

- HP agents (included in the support pack/PSP) need to be installed on the host.  Special note here, you don't need everything in the PSP installed - for example, skip installing the WBEM providers for now unless you want to deal with WBEM for security reasons or otherwise.  SNMP works just fine where extra security isn't needed.

- The System Management Homepage (SMH) should be installed and configured to accept messages (preferably via SNMP - the WBEM option is enabled if you installed the WBEM providers - again i wouldn't recommend unless you need it). This is also in the support pack/PSP so you can install it along with the agents.

Once your SMH on the host is displaying everything nicely, you are ready to add it to SIM.

- Discover the host in SIM and ensure that the task completes.  You can input the SNMP credentials within the discovery task, or you can specific them in your Global Credentials in SIM so you don't have to enter them for every discovery task.  You need to be sure the task mentions that it can communicate via SNMP and that it sees the agents.  If either of these fails, you won't get events properly.  SIM should be populating the server record with serial number, product number, etc.  Reverse DNS could be an issue as well, especially if your server gets discovered by IP and not by name.  Read the task results for any issues here.  

- Once the discovery task is done, go to your newly added host, and through the Control Panel, open up HP Management Agents.  On the SNMP settings tab, you will find a button that says "Send Test Trap".  Click it.

- On your SIM server, check the Events tab for the host you just sent a trap from.  It if worked, you will see the test event.   If this is a sandbox/test server, you can test various events by removing redundant hardware components.

All HP events (and actually a lot more) are in SIM by default.  You don't have to define anything out of the box.  SIM contains all HP MIBs so it knows how to interpret any trap coming from an HP server - including those generated by tape drives, etc.. attached to the servers.

There is obviously a lot more to it.  If you haven't installed SIM yet, you have a long way to go, but the setup wizard tasks post SIM install will get you to a point that SIM will accept new systems.  The above instructions would be put to use once you have SIM ready for discoveries.  You can do the agent/SMH part before SIM (it's a good idea anyhow, regardless of monitoring tools).  You didn't mention if you used the agents already.

Thanks..

[Derek_Bannard]

This seems very involved.  I'll just see if there's a way to enable SNMP on our HP ESXi Proliant's and use another monitoring program.

Thanks for the info, I do appreciate you taking the time to write it out.  Guess I'm not patient enough to do all that to monitor the health of the hard drives in our Proliant servers.

[LGentile]

Derek,

Just a follow-up - sorry if I steered you away from SIM.  Generally, it is a complex tool, but fairly easy to get working provided you have the requirement per server/device you are monitoring with SIM.

For ESXi you'll need the providers installed (if HP hardware) and you can install them post ESXi build, or get the embedded install from HP which includes the bundle you need.  If you already have ESXi running and you use vCenter and Update Manager you can download what is called the "offline bundle" which will help you update these components/drivers as well.

If you are not willing to deal with SIM (it's free, remember, for most basic functions), you can look into something like SolarWinds, which has different products, but their main ones like SAM/NPM will pull hardware information (without monkeying with MIBs) and they work fairly well, there are just some gaps, but the software is cheap (not free :)  ).  SW Orion uses the vSphere API directly, so no need to worry about SNMP.  From my understanding, you cannot query any OIDs over SNMP for ESXi at all - the agents are simply not there (for HP hardware).  Dell does offer the full OpenManage package to be installed on ESXi, but i am not sure if you can use SNMP (we don't have Dell ESXi at this time, but will soon).

let me know if you have other questions.  Our SIM environment is large and it has taken us a while to get where we are, but now that i am happy with its operation, we are getting tickets through Remedy, etc.. on events that occur, so it's working well for us.

Thanks!

[Grimaldy Soto]

Did you manage to get what you need, if not let us know.

I know this is a very old thread, but you never know

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— Leonardo da Vinci