HP SIM or Bust?

[THunter]

Hey all,
This is definitely a newbie question - but, I thought I would ask any way.

I worked for a large government agency and budgets are REAL tight right now. We own about 200+/- HP Proliant MLs, DLs, and print/tape units. We also own Dell PowerEdge and SUN Sunfire servers as well (whatever is low bid at the time).

We would like to install HP SIM (something cheap or free mind you) to help monitor server health, utilization, reporting, etc. -- but, do not want to deploy agents to do so. Does HP SIM do this and to what extent or is there another tool we should be taking a look at?

Thanks for any help or insight.

Troy

[Rob Buxton]

HP SIM can monitor servers without agents. But you're just going to get an up / down status from them. By configuring SNMP you'd get some identification of the HP Servers and less on the others.

If the HP Servers were built with Smart Start they'll already have the agents that give you all of the pre-failure and hardware failure alerts.
Without agents you get less warnings.

If you're happy with just up / down notifications and maybe you also want to check web services etc. then you should look at things like Nagios and others that are hardware agnostic.

But you will not get the same level of detail that you get with HPSIM fo HP Servers.
Also, even with the agents HPSIM is all free. The main cost is time required to set things up. But that's true of all management products.

[JKytsi]

also, if You are running Linux on the servers. Latest SIM can get some more detailed identification info through SSH without agents. Also if You have installed/enabled SNMP on the servers (no agents) You can get traps to SIM but not so detailed and You can't get the prefailure events.