Using SIM 4.2 for Ping Alert of Server Status

[David Ramirez_2]

We're currently using a product called What's Up Gold to monitor the up/down status of our servers, using ip ping. We'd like to retire that product and use sim for this purpose. Is there a way to have sim regularly ping all servers and alert when they don't reply? Preferably / optimally we'd like a console from which our operators could only view the servers that we want them to see, and the server icons would appear as "green" if up or "red" if down. That is how our What's Up Gold product currently works. We don't want them to have access to create / modify / delete anything. Thank you, David Ramirez

[Jason Hindson]

HP SIM can do this. It will regularly ping the servers and can also be configured to receive SNMP traps from the HP Management Agents.

I haven't examined all of the delegation features in HP SIM, but I believe it can be setup to grant limited rights to groups of users.

As for the color coded status of the servers, not a problem (green, yellow, and red).

You should be able to load HP SIM and operate it in parrellel with you current system until you have had time to fully evaluate all the features of HP SIM.

[clausw]

definitly no Prob's for SIM.
You have a UserRoleConcept and you can configure view's, group systems and so on

[David Ramirez_2]

Kewl, thanks for that info. We are/have been running sim for a long time, currently running 4.2. I haven't been able to figure out how to make it ping all of my servers at a regularly scheduled interval with a custom task or something like that, and then put that status into the console. I realize that sim gives you red/yellow/green status for servers, but I thought that was based on hardware status polling, not on ping-based polling. I don't want our operators to be seeing servers as red because there is a hardware problem... only if the server doesn't respond to ping. Can you tell me how I could set that up? Thanks!

[Jason Hindson]

The servers report to HP SIM in a number of ways including IP Ping, SNMP, and HP Agents. I believe you can obtain the status of a server even without the agents loaded. If a server in HP SIM is pingable it should report a green status even if none of the other methods (SNMP or HP Agents) are configured to report.

[Steve Kadish]

Hi,

Just to put in my two cents, I don't feel that SIM is a good replacement for What's Up Gold. I use two solutions, myself; SIM is invaluable for letting me know what's going on with the hardware and services on my HP servers, while Adrem NetCrunch (which is similar to What's Up) pings and checks ports on router, switches, servers, etc.

If the have Insight agents on the managed servers, the status shown in SIM will be influenced by the agents; green if nothing is wrong, yellow or orange for various hardware problems, and red if the server is unreachable by ping. If you don't install the agents, you are losing out on valuable information.

Since SIM is free, you CIO can't really complain about ROI on it, can s/he?

Hope that helps!

- Steve

[Jason Hindson]

Steve

Have you used SIM to monitor your switches and routers? I know it has the capability to monitor network gear among other things. Do you have any comments on the abilities of SIM to monitor/manage anything beyond servers?

[Steve Kadish]

David,

Yes, at one point I was monitoring a small number of Cisco devices through SIM. While it has the ability to send a ping to a device, it cannot check a port. Also, while you can configure your device to send an SNMP trap to SIM, you will need to first compile the MIB, which may be cumbersome - I know that Cisco MIBs, at least, have required a lot of editing in the past.

NetCrunch already comes with many MIBs for different equipment types and manufacturers, and allows me to configure monitoring dependencies - useful when you are dealing with WAN connections.

Basically, the summary is that SIM is a great product, and can be used to do limited monitoring of just about any device, but it is not really designed for full-scale WAN mapping and monitoring.

- Steve

[David Ramirez_2]

Steve - thank you very much, that was exactly the answer(s) that I was looking for. I agree that What's Up Gold is better suited for just monitoring up/down status of servers based on replies to ping, while sim is great for monitoring and alerting on hardware problems. I was just hoping that someone else had experience or knowledge with trying to do the same thing that I was. Thanks!