Hardware monitoring

[Johnlee_2]

We have over 100 hp servers in production throughout our managed sites with no insight into the status of the physical hardware. Our monitoring service can see software level SNMP/WMI devices but not the status of physical server hardware. I know HP has some good tools to do this. One specific area would be failed drives in a RAID array, without hardware level monitoring we have no idea that a drive failed unless your looking onsite at the drive lights. They were set up with Smart Start, some SNMP and some HP agents. They all have ILO ports.
I am a new technician and was looking for some input on the best way to achive this goal. Any help would be appreciated.

[fred Passeron]

hi

HP SIM is the piece that is missing in your picture.

http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/hpsim/index.html?jumpid=go/hpsim

According to what you wrote, you 're somehow half way there. You have insight agents installed on your servers: this means that you have the necessary instrumentation to generate alerts on hardware failures (raid degradation for instance).

However, you miss the central part (the CMS : central management server) where these alerts should be sent to. The HP SIM server will server as a trap recipent for these alerts, it could also send you email on the reception of dedicated alerts. He can be used to generate reports...

One specific area would be failed drives in a RAID array, without hardware level monitoring we have no idea that a drive failed unless your looking onsite at the drive lights.
=>Once the CMS and your servers properly setup, you will be able to create some automation : for instance whenever HP SIM recieves an snmp trap that indicates a drive failure, HP SIM will send an email to you in which you will find details about the faulty server, which disk is having an issue...

key benefits :
http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/hpsim/benefits.html

download:
http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/hpsim/dl_windows.html#windows

hope it helps.

fred

[Johnlee_2]

Thank you very much, I am starting to see exatly what you mean it is the missing part and I should be able to piece this all together to see what is going on with the hardware in those servers.

[fred Passeron]

hi

here are the main pointers :
Main page:
http://www.hp.com/go/hpsim

note that /go/"what you look for often works on the HP website. For instance http://www.hp.com/go/msa


Sizer page : HP passport needed :to size your HP SIM server HW requiereements :
http://h71019.www7.hp.com/activeanswers/Secure/274366-0-0-0-121.html

download page:
http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/hpsim/dl_windows.html

installation guide:
http://docs.hp.com/en/418812-004/index.html

All necessary reading to be found here :
http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/hpsim/infolibrary.html

hope it helps

fred

Thanks to apply points :-)