Monitoring "UPS Manager II" via Big Brother?

[Mike Mayer]

Is it possible to have Big Brother monitor a PowerTrust II UPS?

Better stated, and maybe more probable - is there a MIB or something similar that will let Big Brother poll HP's "UPS Manager II" utility (which in turn is polling/monitoring UPS's via SMTP)?

The idea is that you'd have Big Brother set up to threshold and thus be green/yellow/red against things like battery voltage, batt temperature, input voltage, "on battery" alarms, etc. and other parameters normally gathered by UPS Manager II's daemons, on a particular machine.

I've looked at NUT - Network UPS Tools (http://www.exploits.org/nut/) which has a lot of stuff supporting various UPS's, but nothing yet specific to HP UPS Manager II, or even the PowerTrust UPS's.

Currently, we have Big Brother monitoring HP's standard ups_mond, on lots of HPUX machines. Works well. However, ups_mond goes away (i.e., must be disabled) when you start using UPS Manager II. UPS Manager II presumably replaces the older ups_mond.

Thanks for any hints...

Mike Mayer

[Ross Martin · Accepted solution]

Hello Mike,

My name is Ross Martin and I just logged in as first time attendee to the HP Forum. I am an expert on the UPS are of System Admin for the HP Response Center.

Q. "...is there a MIB or something similar that will let Big Brother poll HP's "UPS Manager II" utility (which in turn is polling/monitoring UPS's via SMTP)? "

A. The only MIB's I am aware of is with the Event Monitoring System (EMS) which is part of the STM Diagnostic bundle. There is a Hardware Monitor for ups called dm_ups that monitors and reports UPS activity. UPS ManagerII is proprietary and there are no known hooks to alter it that I am aware of.

Q. I've looked at NUT - Network UPS Tools (http://www.exploits.org/nut/) which has a lot of stuff supporting various UPS's, but nothing yet specific to HP UPS Manager II, or even the PowerTrust UPS's. "

A. Depending on which vintage of PowerTrust UPS you have, you may go to their OEM and see if there is any additional UPS Software Utilities that may work. PowerTrustI's are made by Best Power (recently bought by PowerWare). Visit http:/www.bestpower.com -- it will forward to PowerWare -- click on North America and then click on the word "SEARCH" on the gray bar, then Powerware -- In the search window, enter 'checkups' then press "Go" -- here is some additional software that may be more flexible -- plus you can contact their support team for additional helps.

The other vintage is the PowerTrustII's. These are OEM'd by American Power Conversion (APC). They were contracted by HP to design an interface that would be compatible with using ups_mond (PowerTrustII's may work with UPS ManagerII, but support is limited as there has been no update to UPS ManagerII for a few years). So, you might contact APC to see if they have ideas on how to monitor using Big Brother.

Q. "Currently, we have Big Brother monitoring HP's standard ups_mond, on lots of HPUX machines. Works well. However, ups_mond goes away (i.e., must be disabled) when you start using UPS Manager II. UPS Manager II presumably replaces the older ups_mond."

A. Actually, ups_mond is the preferred power management software over UPS ManagerII -- UPS ManagerII does not have all of its functionality working and it does not have any current updates to resolve it. You must use only one of the power management softwares at a time -- if ups_mond is running when UPS ManagerII is launched, it will cause "getty respawning too rapidly" messages on the console. If you want to measure battery time and some of the other features not available on ups_mond, then check out Best Power's CheckUPSII - its functions seem to work more reliably.

Bottom Line: My suggestion is to use ups_mond for reliability and supportability over UPS ManagerII. If you need to monitor additional features not available on ups_mond, then check BestPower for PowerTrustI and APC for PowerTrustII.

Hope that helps.

[Mike Mayer]

Ross,

That was a terrific response, very informative - thank you for taking the time.

I have passed your comments in their entirety to the other HP Admins here. As a result, we will likely be revisiting the method by which we look at our UPS's. We had been heading down the UPS Manager II path, however you raised enough valid questions to warrant having another look at our strategy.

I don't know if I can assign points to an HP employee's forum response, but you would have got a 10 out of that one.

Regards,

Mike Mayer

[Ross Martin]

Thanks Mike.

Your comments are appreciated.

[Mike Mayer]

Ross,

I have been doing some further investigation. I discovered that the method by which we use Big Brother to monitor ups_mond, is to have it scan for new UPS-oriented error messages in /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log. If something is detected by ups_mond, it dumps an error to that file. BB scans it ever few minutes, on each of our machines (hundreds).

In the case of UPS Manager II, it does not do error logging to that file, but rather to the file /opt/upsmgr/manager/log/upsmgrmap.log. That file receives all sorts of information, but the one's of interest start with the string "Message: ". There are 15 or so, ranging from on-battery, to temperature, to bad battery, etc.

And just as Big Brother can be told to scan syslog.log for ups_mond (and go red/yellow/green based on a user defined level of error severity), I suspect similar can be done with that upsmgrmap.log file to see the latest messages from UPS Manager II.

The UPS error messages that we scan for in syslog.log are defined in /opt/bb/etc/bbdef.sh.

So, that gives us somewhere to go. Doesn't appear on the surface that we actually need a MIB to get to UPS Manager II's data structures, which is where I was heading with my original question.

I also checked out the 3rd. party software from BestPower and APC. They could be a possibility as well. We'll see how the Big Brother method goes.

Regards,

Mike Mayer

[Ross Martin]

Mike,

That's good information. Ups Manager II actually has three logging areas:

snmpd.log,
upsmgrmon.log, and
upsmgrmap.log

But it sounds like upsmgrmap.log is the one that will work for you.

Thanks for the update.

Ross Martin