Automatic Hardware Polling in SIM 5.1

[Tom Scheppler]

I am monitoring 300 HP Intel-Based servers with a SIM 5.1 SP1 instance. When I took over this duty I noticed they had a "Hardware Polling" job running every 5 minutes on the entire environment. I thought that was crazy as the agents were supposed to send updates on their status. So I disabled that job. After I replaced a drive in a server, the failed hardware status remained for over 3 days. Out of curiosity I ran the Hardware polling job and it went green. Is my instance misconfigured or is this by design? Thanks! Tom

[Rob Buxton]

Hardware polling is what checks that the server is there and assesses overall server health. If you don't run it, then you will not be notified if a server crashes.

SNMP Traps are sent when the agents on a server detect a failure of some component.

You can change the HW Polling Interval or set up a new HW Polling task that uses less protocols and run it more often.

[MattLavallee2]

Following on Rob's answer, you have to be really certain that all of the SNMP traps are enabled and successfully communicate with SIM before turning down hardware polling. Send test traps, and (in particular to the storage) ensure that "Identify Systems" returns valid SMI-S CIMOM information... otherwise SIM is blind to the storage config.

Hope that helps,
-Matt