HPSIM 7.3 installed, now what?

[xzaf]

HI all,

I have installed HPsim 7.3 just out of box, ran the intial setup wizard and kind of click next next...

I am completely lost with this and i need someone to help me out with the setup for -

- Server monitoring alerts

- Server firmware alerts

- Server alerts for failure etc..

i would really appreciate a step by step guide or video showing how i can achive the above as i am a complete novice to this software.

what should i be configuring on clients side and on HPsim server?

Much appreciated.

Thanks

[Andrew_Haak]

This forum is full of posts how to configure SIM. I know this is not what you want to hear but start with telling what you did. Did you add a subnet to discover? If your server spans over multi subnet and or firewall did you open ports for discovery? Do you have Windows, ESX or Linux or all of the bove ? Do you have credentials for the OS ? What type of hardware do you plan to monitor ? Do you want email or any other forward to a monitorign tool or is SIM the only monitoring tool ? So that's a lot of questions back and before i can help you i need to know at least some of these thing to be able to help you.

[xzaf]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the quick reply please see below answers to your questions -

Subnet- yes for now i have added local subnet to discover - will add more after i have got HPsim working.

i have mostly windows and a few ESX servers - all HP hardware

credentials?  i have created an AD account with domain admin rights for now and used that to install HPsim?

Hardware - for now HP servers but when am  confident with the setup of HPsim may look to add HP switches (if thats is possible)

Email - i have already configured that and only want to use HPsim as monitoring tool.

all im after at this stage is how to get the basic monitoring and alerts of failure, firmwares etc going and then extends later with subnets and other features...

i have uploded a couple of screen prints to show what i see, i only see server with serial numbers and no IP except one which is the HPsim server itself? and firmware baseline...Please let me know if you need more screen prints to determine settings?

Thanks

[Andrew_Haak]

For starters do you have a reverse dns zone and can the SIM server resolve the discovered ip adresses?

Can you ping the IP-adres you scan?

Sim pings IP-adresses if it can ping them it will try a number of protocols like SNMP, HTTP, WBEM and SSH. With WBEM wich is the best for Windows you only need an account that has local Admin rights. So Lets try that first. The first thing you can post id the log for the identification of a Windows server.

[xzaf]

Hello,

Yes i have reverse DNS setup.

Yes i can ping the iP i scan.

i have installed hp agents and am assuming WBEM is also part of it? how do i check it is installed for sure?

Using domain account with Admin rights for now but will change once i get things running.

I have added SNMP settings on one of the server and it seemed to have picked that up properly with hostname. Does this mean WBEM is not installed or not working?  how do i check this and set this correctly as you say it is best for windows please?

Thanks

[Andrew_Haak]

At this time WBEM would be installed rather than the SNMP agents. The WBEM agent is installed on recent instalations. If the server has WBEM mentioned under protocols it's installed. If you use a domain Admin account you should be able to read the WBEM agent. SNMP agents are the older choice for agents, WBEM is more secure as to the SNMP v1 Windows has installed by default.

if you use SNMP and WBEM you can get confused as you can get the SNMP, WBEM and ILO status for one server.

so for Windows you should use WBEM, for Linux SNMP and for ESX WBEM for the later versions and SNMP for versions 5.0 and lower.

Also if you have gen8 or higher you use neither but discover the server trough the ILO using SNMP. For these types of servers you also need the Agentless management agent and a piece of configuration on the ILO to receive, send SNMP info and if needed to send as the hostnamehostname instead of the default iloname as the events would otherwise be plotted on the ILO.

[xzaf]

can you please confirm wher ei should check for WBEM on clients? i know its selected under protocols on HPSIM.

Also can you please guide me with step by step settings for SNMP between HPSIM and client - e.g what should i set on HPSIM for SNMP and on  servers being monitored?

Cheers

[Andrew_Haak]

Hello again,

I would recommend to use WBRM instead of the SNMP agents and snmp default stack in Windows servers.

For linux servers you can only use snmp agent and thus snmp.

For esx you can only use wbem for 5.1 and above. If your server is a gen 8 or newer you only use the Agentless Management Service. This is the latest and greatest way of monitoring your hardware.

To start i would use Windows or unix credentials to create a trust between SIM  and the server you wa t to monitor.

this csn be done with a repair from configure > repair? If you set the wbem agent install on in the first screen, the second . screen wbem settings and a trust. If needed you can also set a non admin account to be used later for discovery.

The account that runs the repair can be your own account, for discovery you should create a service account with either admin rights or a account that you gave with the repair option to discover with a non admin account.

This should be enough for now, lets first try to identify your servers with the options discribed above.

if you get this running let me know or if you run into problems. If you have problems please include a discovery log for a failed server to troubleshoot.

[xzaf]

Hello again,

i am getting - see attached

WBEM protocol settings are not valid/enabled for this system in HP SIM. Check yo
ur HP SIM settings for identification via WBEM.
Subscribe to WBEM / WMI Indications ................................. [FAILED]

Thanks

[Andrew_Haak]

This error means that there are no valid wbem credentials. What os is the target server?

if it's a windows server you need an account that is local admin on the target server or you need to do a repair with admin rights to set an account that does not need to be admin. I would first try the admin account.

If you get the hng of it you can proceed with setting up a non admin account, this is a repair option. You only need an admin account to set this up.

But for now first try an admin account. Do you know how to set the credentials? You can either set it for one object, a group of discovery objects or general for all objects in SIM.

[xzaf]

OS is windows 2008

using AD account with domain admin so that should be more than enough?

Thanks

[Andrew_Haak]

Hello again,

Yes for Windows systems with a WBEM agent this should work just fine. If you run into problems please post the discovery log so we can have a look if there are any issues with the discovery.

[xzaf]

Hello Again,

can you please tell me how i can monitor ESXi 5 servers and virtual machines hosted on them? i see those discovered with thier Serial number but not the host name.

Cheers  

[Andrew_Haak]

Hello again,

Is the server a gen8 or higher or a gen7 or lower?

[xzaf]

Hi
It's Gen 6

Thanks

[Andrew_Haak]

Hello again,

Did you install the offline bundle from HP that contains agents and drivers? This package is needed for monitoring your HP hardware servers. The software csn be found here http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?sp4ts.oid=3884100&swItemId=MTX_ba94e3edea26495d8540bc88de&swEnvOid=4166

The needed credentials are root or yet better a new account with root rights.

[xzaf]

Can SNMP be used to mintor ESXi?

[Andrew_Haak]

Hello,

ESX 5.0 was the last version to use SNMP. The agents today use WBEM or AMS on a GEN8 or newer. With this kind of monitoring SNMP is used on the ILO. The only OS that use SNMP is Linux or the opdr Windows.

[xzaf]

Hello again.

Unfortunately the ESXi version im using is 5 and the download is for ESXi 5.5. Does this mean i have to use SNMP, if so any pointers how i should do this please?

cheers

[Andrew_Haak]

The 5.0i software can be found here :

http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?sp4ts.oid=3884100&swItemId=MTX_66cea0897277425aa9271efbe7&swEnvOid=4115

I'm not sure if this is SNMP or WBEM.

[xzaf]

Hello again

any idea why i dont get the disk size, instead i get the below threshold value?

"Event description: Rising Threshold passed. An alarm entry has crossed its rising threshold. The instances of those objects contained within the variable list are those of the alarm entry which generated this trap.

Description: E:\ [BE Drive:NTFS] Volume{6afa5409-8722-11e4-acca-d8d385b965b8} disk space Severity Level: warning Current Value: 80 Threshold Top: 80 Threshold Owner: Insight Web Agent"

Thanks

[Andrew_Haak]

Hello again,

Treshholds can be set for each server and disk. You can set percentage alerts not exact diskspace.

[xzaf]

so the above alert is correct then?

[Server-Support]

@Andrew_Haak How about changing the provider to become WBEM instead of SNMP ?

[Andrew_Haak]

Hello again,

The type of source should not matter, you can only set percentages so...