IBM Servers and HP SIM

[Colin Moors]

Hello all,

I have set up SIM and everything is working OK - great stuff so far and very useful. Our mail team want me to monitor their servers - most of which are IBM. I'll be going in cold, as I have historically supported only HP (Compaq) or Dell server products.

Has anyone here had experience of what reporting I can expect to achieve? Is it just SNMP pure and simple + ping etc. or is there a way of making the IBM agent talk meaningfully to SIM?

I'm running SIM on a win2k server ML370 G3.

Any advice or suggestions gratefully received.

[David Claypool]

HP SIM will be able to collect the most information through WBEM/WMI. Make sure you set up in protocol settings a valid username/password to get access to the IBM systems...

[Colin Moors]

Thanks - I have set up WMI to talk to the CMS. What sort of information can I expect? In your experience, would I be better off using Insight in a limited capacity or relying on the information via SNMP/Director agent?

[David Claypool]

A little bit of both--which is the same as for a ProLiant. In other words, the IBM Director agent fulfills the same role as the HP Insight agents.

HP SIM will be able to receive SNMP traps originating with the Director agent. For data collection of relatively static data (configuration info, etc) HP SIM will use WMI. When you are investigating a problem and want to "drill down" to the specific information in real time, going to the links page for the device will have a link to the Director agent which you can examine for the exact detail.

[Colin Moors]

Thanks for the help. There's no link to the director agent - maybe I need to check my configuration again.

[David Claypool]

Check the file AdditionalWSdisc.props on your HP SIM server and make sure that the port your Director agent is sitting at is one of the ones that is being scanned. The headers of the file document the syntax if you need to add a line for the port. Then kick off the daily device discovery task so it will go out and scan for the agent.

[Colin Moors]

Thanks again - I'll try it later today.

[Colin Moors]

Nearly there... one final thing, if you will indulge me. I've set up WMI and edited the additionalWsDisc.props file and SNMP is running fine. However, when I go to the system management homepage for my IBM test server, it displays "Default Web Server" - http://servername/ - on the Sys Man homepage.

http port 411 redirects itself to https port 423, and requires a login, accessed through a regular browser session, and I'm wondering if this has anything to do with it. AFAIK, Director uses an Apache server.

I've restarted SIM and run the daily discovery in an attempt to get it to recognise the correct port. Are the .props files loaded as required, or at SIM startup? Just wondering why it's not being seen.

[David Claypool · Accepted solution]

At startup, so either reboot the HP SIM server or restart the service...

[Colin Moors]

Thanks for all your help on this one - it works fine now.