SNMP

[Dave Johnson_1]

I am new to SNMP. I have never set it up or used it on any system. I have been asked what my PA-RISC 11.11 and IA-64 11.23 servers can do with SNMP. We are looking to have a MS Windows server be the central point for all SNMP here and my boss wants to add the UNIX systems to the mix. So I thought I would start here and ask for any advice on how to set this up on my 9 HP-UX boxes as well as what information can be reported to the main collection server.

Thanks in advance for your help,
-Dave

[Michael Steele_2]

Hi Dave:

This is wide area that's specific enough to have its own forum:


http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/familyhome.do?familyId=121

And there are several off the shelf applications that summerize at a high level. HP OpenView, Insight Manager for example as well as many open source application like 'etheral'.

Some advice, I've never been satisfied with any. They're suppose to take the place of tier one, first response. But they only get very general alarms. Need constant administration and get easily fa'cocked if you don't have a dedicated administrator full time.

Even if you do have a full time HP Openview admin, for instance, as an System Administrator you'll still want you're own cron scripts to catch everything that the SNMP application doesn't.

If I we're talking to management, I'd advise them of this and insist that you still have an email pager in place for your supplemental cron scripts.

Start with HP OpenView. Its been around the longest. And just google for it.

[Torsten.]

About SNMP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snmp

You can do a lot of different things with this.

I guess the first you want to do is to be alerted if a problems occur.

At this time you may start with configuration of the online diagnostics to send all serious/critical warnings to a snmp trap destination.
See

/etc/opt/resmon/lbin/monconfig

[Dave Johnson_1]

Thanks for the info so far. I would have given more points, but did not want the "magic" answer flag on the thread yet.

More back ground. I currenly have shell scripts that run on cron so does the DBA. The VP has decided to have all systems monitored (meaning the Windows stuff) and centralize ALL monitoring and alerting. So in addition to the monitoring I already do, my boss wants the HP-UX systems to report SNMP information to a What's Up Gold server to handle the centralization part.

I will need to know what can be reported and how to set that stuff up. I will be looking at the supplied links. Thankx.

[Tim Nelson]

FYI, Unless something has changed recently, HPUX does NOT supply the standard OIDs for "host" metrics, only network. Or unless you created custom reports in WUG you will not get what you need/want.

We did the same project with WUG and after hitting our heads against the HP wall we turned off the HP snmpd and implemented net-snmp ( available via opensource at http://www.net-snmp.org/ )

Once you get this working you will be much happier.

Best of luck.

[Dave Johnson_1]

Tim,
How long ago did you try to do this with WUG?

[Tim Nelson]

3-4 years or so.

If you have a mib browser you can browse the returned info from the native HPUX snmpd. You will find that other than system name, uptime and netinfo, that is all you get, no CPU usage, no MEM usage, no disk usage.

The other cool thing about net-snmp was you could use it to run scripts that would populate OIDs with in or even customize and send traps.

We eventually expanded to our own customized web service because WUG was too limited in what it could do.

Created a status web page with our own mib status' using PHP to do the snmpget and then build the page with cool color coded icons and links.

[Torsten.]

FYI: A different approach for monitoring and managing servers (many different architectures and OS) is HP SIM.

If you like start to read here:

http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/hpsim/index.html