VMS system monitoring software for HP Openview.

[Antoniov.]

Gino,
what do you wish exactly?
I've seen you are expert in this area so I guess you will know as vms people works and what are their needing.

Antonio Vigliotti

[Dale A. Marcy]

We are not running OVO, we just run the Robomon Automation portion of the Heroix software. I forgot about your OVO portion of the question by the time I got down the responses where Robomon was being discussed.

[Mobeen_1]

Wim,
Good that you checked some of the links :), i would not have to talk about them.

Yes, you can specify exceptions that are common among all your nodes only on one node and then commit the KM. When you do this, the same rule/exception will apply to other nodes as well.

If you have any DCL command procedures that you would want to do, the same could be done.

In addition to this, you can also cutomize the KMs (Knowledge Modules). Trust me a lot can be done and was done on our environment.

As for the XP, i totally agree with you. I had to reinstall all the console s/w couple of times :-)
But you also have the option of running it on Unix.

You could also monitor for some thresholds and set pages/emails for certain alerts and follow those up with some recovery actions (this could be any DCL procedure)

Do let me know if you have any specific questions.

regards
Mobeen

[Ian Miller.]

cockpit manager
www.hp.be/CockpitMgr
will also feed events into HP Openview.
However I don't know what version of VMS can be be monitored - ask Johan (address on above page) as he's a helpful person and would know the answer.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Mobeen,

Still a few questions.

Is BMC starting a process for each check ?
What is the system load of BMC (%cpu, of course including child processes) ?

What should be the approx cost for it for usage on a GS160 with 2 cpu's ? And for an alpha station 500 ?

Gino,

Be aware that if you use snmp to pass the alarm that this is a one try shot. In case of network problems your alarm is lost.

[Ian Miller.]

I also see on
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/mgmt_agents/
"Version 3.02 of the Management Agents allows OpenVMS systems to be managed from HP OpenView Network Node Manager (NNM) using the Insight Manager 7 plug-in."

[Uwe Zessin]

Whatever you use - homegrown or bought - it will be quite some work. Before buying a product I would define a set of things that you want to have monitored.

The product should have the ability for user-written extensions / callouts, so that you can implement additional functionality.

I don't know if there is any product that has this feature, but it sounds a reasonable request so that you can use its notification and logging and don't have to implement your own.

[Mobeen_1]

Wim,
The following is the information requested

Is BMC starting a process for each check ?
What is the system load of BMC (%cpu, of course including child processes) ?

No this is not the way it is done in BMC. It doesn't start one process for each check on the system. Infact this is very much configurable. It starts some where between 3-5 processes and thats it. The frequencyy of polling is also configurable.

As for the load on the CPU, it really depends on the polling rate that you set. We had set polling rate (1 min) and it was noticed that BMC was consuming < 5% of CPU (on a CI Cluster, 2 Alpha 4100 nodes with 3 CPU each)

I would suggest that if you are serious about exploring this, then install on the evaluation version and if required ask them to extend the evaluation period, so that you have enough time to make a decision.

But one thing i hate about this product is the installation. It was never easy to do that :-)

I am not sure if they have changed anything now.

Let me know if you have any questions

regards
Mobeen

[Willem Grooters]

Gino,

another product to look at - if you have to monitor VMS systems (and attached storage) - is Cockpit Manager, originally a HP product but now maintained (and owned?) by Emulators International (http://www.emulatorsinternational.com).
It's heavily used in our company for monitoring a number of sites, both local and remote

Willem

[Ian Miller.]

Good try Willem - I mentioned Cockpit Mgr previously :-) It will send events to HP OVO according to the docs.

Its still owned and developed by hp (hello Johan :-) but sold via Emulators International.