Suggestions for Improving HP SIM

[Tim McGue]

All,

Below are my suggestions for improving HP SIM. Can someone at HP review? Others feel free to add to this post to consolidate.

-OpenSSH: The utilization of OpenSSH is flaky at best. The setup and configuration for myself and others have not gone as documented. The mxagentconfig rarely works. Either the setup/configuration of OpenSSH should be improved or the previous method used in HP Insight Manager 7 should be returned.

-Event Notifications: When creating an event notification the end user is unable to select from a list of system lists. Instead the end user has to recreate a system list there. Change the event notification tasks to allow the selection of system lists.

-Memory Leak: There is a memory leak in the application that focuses around authentication failure traps. This is easily recreatable and has turned several companies away from implementation. Refer to case number 3204531519.

-Initial Support Pack Install: The "run now" option for the initial support pack install fails. There are a lot of bugs around this initial install process.

-Duplicate Entries in Reports: The reports showing processor and memory information show duplicate information per server. This is probably due to incorrect WMI processing. This should be reviewed and corrected.

-SQL Server Install: When installed in a SQL Server environment the configuration made by the setup routine and the subsequent SIM processing grows the transaction log to such a size where the SQL server is no longer functional.

Tim McGue

[David Claypool]

Tim:

Thanks for your input and your patience. the dev and marketing teams read this forum and consider all input seriously. All of these items are being looked at already and some already have a fix which will be part of a 4.1 release late March/early April. In some cases, going back to "the previous method used in HP Insight Manager 7" is not possible since the hpSIM application can be hosted on Linux or HP-UX in addition to Windows, facilities from Windows can't be utilized. In other cases (notably your comment about system lists in Event Notification), human factors engineering and usability studies led us to adopt these changes because we believed that they improved the product.

We'll be publishing more details as we get closer to a 4.1 release date. In the meantime, please continue to post your comments because they really do make a difference in delivering better product in the future.

[Rob Buxton]

In response to the OpenSSH, then adding a New User part of IM needs to do any OpenSSH additions for that User under certain conditions.
If the User being added has the ability to run tasks then the OpenSSH Account should be created.
I've not yet succeeded in getting a job to run under an account other than the one HPSIM was installed under, despite a lot of testing. I have successfully added the OpenSSH USer and can log in using an SSH Client (putty), but running tasks under this account still fails.
We await 4.1 with considerable interest. But I'm impressed with the first up run of HPSIM.

[Scott Shaffer]

Rob, just so I understand, you are saying that when you add a user to HP SIM (by selecting them from the domain) you would like a way to specify that the user should be added as SSH users on all the servers?

[Rob Buxton]

Scott,
maybe, see below but an other option may be:

If a User adds a task, then the default be that the task run under an account that does have OpenSSH access, e.g. the original install account.

The problem I have at the moment is that I cannot get tasks to run under any account other than the account that I installed HPSIM & OpenSSH in.
I've done some more testing and I think the latter approach may be better. Here OpenSSH or HPSIM has got very upset when the Home directory for the Account being used is not on the local Server e.g. \\Servername\Share$. I've had to manually hack the OpenSSH passwd file and manually create a home directory on the Server just to get maxagentconfig to work.
So at the moment I've got:
SSH or Putty can login using my account and password to the IM Server.
mxagentconfig has added the keys to the modified account and directory. There's a populated .ssh directory.
But, if I try and run the Command netstat from the tools menu it fails with an Authentication error.
"EXCEPTION CLASS: com.hp.mx.exceptions.MxFailedAuthenticationException
EXCEPTION: Authentication failed"

So, at the moment the setting up of User tasks is problematic and OpenSSH is doing us no favours in a Windows environment. I appreciate that this is trying to make things work across multiple platforms. My work around is to change all tasks to run under the Install Account.

[Rob Buxton]

Another area to improve.
MIB Registration and loading.

CIM 7 had all this under the control of a GUI within CIM, but this is devolved down to Command Line tools for SIM. Any chance of it moving back into the main GUI?

[Jesse Gardner]

I'd like to see a GUI-built-in way to manage additional custom fields for each system. We keep track of things like server and application contacts, system uptime priority, etc. Since SIM is a great dynamically updating system its very convenient to use its information, but I hate having to import it to a spreadsheet where I can work with my fields.

[David Claypool]

Jesse:

There are some fields in the agents that are free-form that are collected back to the database and are selectable and reportable. These include the standard SNMP fields Contact and Location and the ProLiant-specific field 'Server Role.'

[Mike Ludwig]

I'm fine with comandline for the MIB registration. I had lots of problems with 7. 3 times the whole system seemed to freeze and start blasting out system unreahcable emails for everything in the database. Got nasty phonecalls from the guys running the smtp servers. I've had 0 problems with the new system and am more than willing to put up with what works.

As for suggestions being able to choose "AND or "OR" when building system lists whould be nice.

[Tim McGue]

I'm echoing the last post for being able to select the And/Or. I've had to create multiple tasks that could be handled by a single task if I could pick the correct And/Or instead of SIM picking it for me.

Tim