HW status without connecting to the client

[Phil Kunze]

I've been playing around with HPSIM in an attempt to get it properly rolled out across the environment.

In general, it's picked up servers and links me to the Web Agent for Hardware Status information fine.

However, we have uncovered a problem here, confirmed by HP and not scheduled to be fixed until v7.10 of the agents, that if there are more than 67 IPs on a machine the web agent will not function. We need a large number of IPs on some machines, as we have a large client that does traffic accounting for it's sites by IP.

My problem is that SIM still gets the hardware status via SNMP, but I have no way of viewing what the problem is, if there is one.

Ideally I would like to be able to view the hardware status info via SNMP only, rather than have a new browser window open up directly to the client each time. This is because I would generally have numerous people viewing the console from our operations LAN, and this will not have ACLs to all of the servers, nor would we want it to.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. I am a little overwhelmed, as all the documentation seems to focus heavily on the SSH aspects, and this is just not feasible in our environment.

Cheers,
Phil

[Rob Buxton]

Haveyou tried shutting down the Web Agents, set them to manual startup.
IM should then just use SNMP for info gathering.

[David Claypool · Accepted solution]

Phil:

Let me try and pick through your various questions and get to the core issue.

You say you want to be able to get an idea of what the actual problem is via SNMP and not just the status. That tells me that you do not have the agents sending SNMP traps to hpSIM when they encounter a problem. The difference is getting a status change versus a full text description of the problem.

We have been working for some time to distance the products as much as possible from SNMP--based on overwhelming customer feedback. hpSIM relies on SNMP for status information, identification and data collection. The only way to view realtime information from the agents is using the web agent GUI. hpSIM does not have a facility to retrieve the information via SNMP and then format it for viewing in the browser. To a certain degree, you could check the check box of the server you are interested in, trigger a data collection task for just that server and then view the data collection report for that server, which would give you information collected via SNMP and then displayed in the browser. However, the data collected is mostly static kinds of data like inventory stuff and may not reflect status information that you may be interested in.

With the exception of the servers you have with more than 67 IP addresses (surely we though that would be enough! The only servers generally with that many or more are web servers--more likely on the internet, not just an intranet--and we don't recommend using our Insight agents on unprotected servers outside firewalls on the internet anyway), the web agents are the way to go. I'm not sure what you mean because we don't use ACLs per se. Once the trust relationship is established via certificate between hpSIM and an agent (and your ProLiant Support Pack should be configured with the certificate before it is distributed so it carries it with it), it is a simple matter to use the role based security features in hpSIM to determine which tools can be used and on what systems to use them.

As far as SSH goes, it has nothing to do with the monitoring aspects you are interested in. It is required only for the distributed task functionality that is a new capability of hpSIM.

[Phil Kunze]

Thanks guys,

I'll play with some of this - most of the SNMP stuff confirms what I expected, I was just interested to know whether it was possible, and I was just missing the option. (I know that in IM7 you could see realtime hardware status via SNMP rather than through the web agents, and was hoping to do the same)

I receive traps alright, but I would prefer to be able to check hw status from the console rather than relying only on alerts (to get the nightshifter to ensure all servers have a green status)

The servers in question are webservers and require such a large number of IPs unfortunately - they are behind firewalls though.

I have suggested to HP previously, when reporting the problem, that it would be good if it were possible to bind the web agent to only one IP/interface. We have a private interface that I would use for management, and this would solve the other problem too, but I was told this is unlikely to be implemented. It would solve a lot of the security concerns over the agents IMHO.

My ACLs comment was because the operations VLAN may not have 2381 open to all customer VLANs we run, and thus the browser windows spawned by SIM wouldn't be able to conncet from those browsers.

Thanks for the clarification on SSH - I'd come to pretty much that conclusion, but it's nice to have it confirmed (I read in the docs that SSH must be installed, but later figured that was just to enable all functions)

Rob, thanks for the idea on shutting down the web agent - will give that a go and see what happens :)