Do I need SIM?

[Pankaj_19]

I already have enterprise monitoring tools - HPOVO/Netcool for health monitoring. Do I need to deploy SIM for server hardware monitoring, or can I extend OVO capabilities to do so? What are the pros and cons of these approaches?

Thank you in advance.

pankaj

[Ross Minkov]

OVO can be configured to monitor most of the things that SIM can monitor, but it might take some fine work to configure for example the hardware monitoring. This is easily done in SIM. On the other side SIM can't monitor processes, disk full, etc. This where OVO is in its prime. Each tool has its use. We use both and on top of them we even have another monitoring tool -- Nagios. We use Nagios for the remote network service monitoring. In either case make sure you install the ProLiant Support Pack (PSP) for Linux on all ProLiant servers that you have. The hpasm agent that comes with it will provide: Monitoring abnormal temperature conditions, Monitoring fan failures, Monitoring the system Fault Tolerant Power Supply, Monitoring ECC memory errors, Automatic Server Recovery (ASR), etc.

HTH,
Ross

[Pankaj_19]

Ross,

Thank you very much for your input. Sorry, I was away for a while.

I've one more question. We don't have SIM deployed in our environment currently. If I want to monitor hardware failures without SIM, what MIBs do I need to monitor or errors in Error Logs that I need to look for to provide comparable functionality?

Thank you again.

Pankaj

[Ross Minkov]

Pankaj,

SIM, btw is free. You can download it from hp.com and there is $0 charge. Once you install SIM on a server it will be ready to go out of the box. All you need to do is scan a subnet/subnets or point it to a hosts file to tell it what do you want it to monitor. On the servers being monitored you need to install the PSP (ProLiant Support Pack). That's all. Then you just configure notification to go to you in SIM.

HTH,
Ross

[David Claypool · Accepted solution]

Pankaj:

If you are using OpenView Operations for Windows, the NT SPI in version 7.1 or later contains built-in policies for ProLiant servers with the Insight agents. You should have the ProLiant Support Pack loaded on each of your servers and the NT SPI will automatically recognize its presence. Among other things, the policies:

- provide a correlated link to the iLO/RILOE in a system
- propagate the ProLiant Status Array condition to the OVOW service map
- provide translation of all events
- provide automatic acknowledgement of corrected conditions (e.g. a drive fails in a RAID array and an event is generated and the service map is updated to indicate the failure; when the drive is replaced, OVOW will automatically acknowledge the previous failure event--without an operator having to hunt for it--and create a new event to show the drive is rebuilding and show a yellow status in the service map; upon completion, OVOW will reflect a drive rebuild complete event, acknowledge the rebuilding event automatically and update the service map to green)
- in-context links to launch to the Insight agent Systems Management Homepage or the HP SIM properties page for that system

Please note that the pre-failure warranty on CPU, drives and ECC memory is only available when the Insight agents are used.

HP SIM has capabilities beyond simple hardware monitoring. For one thing, the version control capability can make it significantly easier to keep up to date with firmware, drivers, utilities and agents.

The Performance Management Pack (which automatically is licensed for the HP SIM server, any pre-ML/DL servers and additionally comes with 5 free licenses that you can apply to any ProLiant that you choose) has unique capabilities to diagnose performance problems brought on through hardware and configuration issues.

You can get a lot more information by visiting http://www.hp.com/go/hpsim

[Pankaj_19]

Ok. Great! Thank you both for providing clarifications.

Pankaj