Systems Insight Manager 101

[dale wheatley]

I havn't found much information on what this program actually does. I have installed it, created a task so that my server room equipment would be monitored. I have setup alerts so that I am paged if something happens. Do I need to leave the program running and open for the notification to occur?

It sounds like this is a powerful program. Also what is the diffence between a managed and unmanaged system?

Thanks in advance.

-- Dale

[Scott_278]

This is the way I think about SIM. The primary function of SIM is to gather SNMP traps from managed devices. Of course you can choose whether or not to be notified about those traps.

Of course for SIM to understand the traps it receives, it must have the MIBs compiled into it. If your "server room equipment" consists of HP servers, then in general you will want to install the server "agents", which monitor hardware resources and can send traps to SIM when certain events occur. However you could also configure SIM to notify you when it receives traps from Cisco equipment, for example, by compiling the appropriate Cisco MIB into SIM.

There are other features SIM has, such as giving you the ability to upgrade firmware and drivers. This feature is called Version Control. The "Version Control Agent", or VCA, is software that runs on servers which gathers driver version information.

Hardware information (via server agents) and software information (via the VCA) is displayed by an application called the System Management Homepage (SMH). It is a web-based application which shows you the status of the server hardware.

There are other more obscure applications you can use with SIM. For example, the Virtual Machine Management (VMM) application allows you to manage virtual machines. Performance Management Pack (PMP) gathers hardware statistics and attempts to identify hardware bottlenecks.

[dale wheatley]

Thanks Scott,

Do I need to be logged into Insight Manager and consequently does it need to be open for it to seed me alerts?

Thanks in advance.

-- Dale

[Scott_278 · Accepted solution]

No, you do not need to be logged in order to receive alerts. However the CMS, or Central Management Server, must have the Insight Manager server service running. The CMS is where you actually install SIM, and is where you tell SNMP on your managed servers to send traps to.

What you do is once you have the MIBs compiled into SIM, you set up an "Automatic Event Handler". An Event Handler basically tells SIM to do something when it receives a particular type of trap, a trap from a particular machine or group of machines, or some combination of the two. You can have it send email, page, run a script, etc...

[dale wheatley]

Ok, I'm making progress. However, one of my servers that is monitored had a warning in the event log (e.g., The C: disk is at or near capacity. You may need to delete some files.) I was not notified of this or another low virtual memory warning. How would I turn these traps on?

Server #1 has Systems Insight Manager installed on it. For Server #2, I did check under HP System Management Home Page | Insight Management Agents | SNMP that under SNMP Agent Appication, Internet and End to End were checked while Physical and Data Link Site was not check.

Furthermore, under Security, READ_CREATE was selected and Accpted Community Name was set to CommunityName1. Also under Trap CommunityName1 was again the name and the trap desitation name was the name of the server #1. Under Management Agents, Server Role was blank, Data Collection Interval was 2 minutes and SNMP Sets and Remote Reboot were both Enabled.

I'm not sure why I wasn't notified. Let me know if you have any thoughts. Thanks in advance.

-- Dale

[Scott_278]

In order to be alerted to disk utilization, you first need to set up thresholds: Configure - Disk Thresholds - Set Disk Thresholds.

Regarding the virtual memory, I don't recall ever seeing anything in the docs or the forum about alerting for those situations. This thread seems to indicate it can't be done.
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/que
stionanswer.do?threadId=1009880