cpu threshold

[Tim Buckholz]

I've searched through the forums and didnt find an answer to my question, so hopefully someone here knows what to do.

I'm trying to setup CPU threshold monitoring on one of my servers which has a process that will overtake a box after a while. I would like for the management agent to send a trap to insight manager when the overall cpu utilization (its a quad cpu box) is > 80%.

Supposedly you can do this from the insight management agent on the machine in question, and going under either 'SNMP Configuration' or Performance / Processors.

Under SNMP Configuration I do not see any of the threshold links that are mentioned in the help file.

Under Performance / Processors it says 'Setting Thresholds: Thresholds cannot be set due to access limitations.' The problem with this is that I logged into the page as administrator, so what more rights can I have?

Any help would be appreciated.

[David Claypool · Accepted solution]

Although you are administrator, the permissions granted to the protocol and the agents need to change to accomodate you. In the Insight agent control panel applet make sure that you have checked the box for "SNMP Sets Enabled." Additionally, your SNMP service needs to have a Read/Write community string defined.

[Tim Buckholz]

Isn't it a pretty big security flaw to have a write SNMP string sitting out there?

[Steve Kadish]

I will also add that I have set up CPU threshhold monitoring for our servers, but that the management agents don't generally generate a trap until the processor has been pinned for approximately a half-hour.

- Steve

[Tim Buckholz]

As I understood it from the help file, your snmp sets are default at 2 min, and it takes 15 consecutive checks for the trap to default. So it takes 30 min for an error to occur.

If you change the snmp sets to say 20 or 30 secs then the error should show up faster.

[Steve Kadish]

Thanks - that is helpful information.

- Steve

[David Claypool]

hpSIM doesn't need a write community string at all really, since it never does any writing. It can get along with just a read string. Any 'transaction' that hpSIM does is not done through SNMP but through HTTPS.

However, the agents use SNMP to communicate among themselves, so you MUST have a READ-WRITE string named in the SNMP service. This can be different from the read string that hpSIM uses. Configured this way your string will only be used internally and never cross the wire.

[Tim Buckholz]

All I needed was the read-write community string in place.

Thanks much for your help.