Basic Hardware Monitoring using HPSIM

[TheRegit]

I cannot begin to say how frustrated I am with HPSIM. I work for a company that provides managed network services and primarily work with Dell hardware. We have a few clients that we monitor running HP ProLiant services and we NEED to be able to monitor the hardware via SNMP. The Dell Open Manage solution is so easy to setup and use. However the HPSIM is a nightmare. Can someone please help me with the procedure to get just basic SNMP hardware monitoring via SNMP with HPSIM? I installed HPSIM on a server and can get to the application, however it doesn't show me any hardware level information. It also loaded the System Management Homepage, which shows me nothing at this point. Please help!!

[Rob Buxton]

You don't mention the OS, so I'll assume Windows.
Depends how you built the HP Servers. If you used Smart Start then the install would have installed SNMP and the HP Agents.

When you first log into HPSIM it runs a config wizard. As part of that you should have entered the details for SNMP, also available via Options->Global Properties.

On a server you need to allow SNMP access, the HPSIM server needs to be an allowed host along with localhost using the configured community name.
With SNMP configured correctly HPSIM should be able to ide the device.

If you logon to the HP Agent's SMH directly, https://server:2381 you can manually import the Trust Certificate into the agent.
This way from HPSIm you can click on the HW Icon and go directly to the SMH.
In addition data collection tasks run and store a great deal of info in a database - very useful fore reporting.

I can only guess they've improved OpenManage, last time I looked it did a lot less than HPSIM.

[TheRegit]

Sorry, yes I am using Windows. I understand that HP Insight Manager does quite a bit more than Dell OpenManage. I guess it is kind of like comparing apples and oranges. However for my purposes Open Manage does more because I can't get HPSIM or HSM to do anything.

I am able to get to the HSM page, however it doesn't give me any information. I did not build this server, I am taking over managing it so I can't answer your question as to how it was installed. All I know is HPSIM and HSM were not loaded when I took it over.

Do I need to load some agents for the HSM to work? Maybe that is all I need. If so where do I get the agents?

Thanks for your help.

[Rob Buxton]

There's two parts and I'm not sure what you have / haven't got.

You browse to HPSIM on https:HPSIMServer:50000

You should be able to login providing you've been given access.
You should probably go to www.hp.com/go/hpsim, select the link to the reference library and pull down the User / Technical Guide. That will give a lot of detail of how you use HPSIM.

Basically it can discover any device it can ping, to do that you use Discovery Ranges (Under Options).
But you can also filter what you want to discover - disable this to start.

For HPSIM to be able to identify a device it needs snmp access as a bare minimum. So that means the device being discovered needs to be configured to allow the HPSIM Server access. On a Windows server - that's the standard SNMP service.

On top of that you've got the HP Agents. These monitor the hardware of each server they're installed on. If there's a problem they use snmp (this is the Trap Destination in snmp) to send a trap to the HPSIM Server. HPSIM can then alert you based on that event.

HPSIM also polls devices, if it cannot detect one that was previously there it will raise an event.

As mentioned you can browse to the HP Agents on any HP Server (if they're installed) directly via https://server:2381.