Hi all,

Is the following possible:

- Monitoring 2 Sun Fire V215 servers (running Solaris 5.10) using HP SIM.

I've been searching the net and came up with SUN's Third Party System Management Integration Software (820-0540-12) Document.

If I'm not mistaken (I'm not a SUN man) the Sun Fire V215 is ALOM based and the above mentioned document states the following:The above quotes makes me wonder if it is possible to monitor the Sun V215's using HP SIM.

Does anybody have any insight into this?

If it is possible, could someone point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance.

Greetingz!

Well, we use HP SIM to watch the SNMP service on most of our Sun gear. Not bad, but not nearly as good as Nagios & Cacti.
If you're talking about just watching out for broken hardware, then SNMP should be right up your alley.
This might help.

@xeleema: Thanks for the fast reply and the provided link.

At first glance (I will have a better look) it looks like the provided link talks about monitoring a HP Proliant server from other platforms, which is not what the company I'm doing this for wants. The SUN V215's need to be monitored from a HP box running windows + HP SIM.

Other solutions (Nagio's et al) are not on the table at the moment (a lot of other boxes are already connected to the HP SIM monitoring box).

The company wants to not only monitor hardware (broken/single points of failure) but also system related events (cpu/memory usage, disk I/O etc) if that is at all possible.

Hope the extra info helps.

Yep, that's possible with SNMP. For starters, there's a pretty good cuddletech guide out there.
I know you mentioned "HP SIM running on a Windows Server", and I have to admit that I would first suggest you talk to HP about SNMP monitoring of non-Windows systems.

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@xeleema: I know about snmp and what it can/cannot do, my question is more specific.

In general HP SIM can monitor SUN boxes, but there seem to be exceptions (as mentioned in my first post). I need to know if this specific SUN box can be monitored with HP SIM and, if possible, to what extend.

As I mentioned before, we use HP SIM to monitor our Sun boxen. Almost all via SNMP. Here's what we do (and do not) catch;

Do's
Uptime (checked every minute, if under 24 hours, alerts once and sleeps for 24 hours).
Filesystem usage (we use DiskSuite/SVM for the local disks, and Veritas Storage-Foundation for the SAN LUNs)
CPU usage
Concurrent Processes (the 1, 5, 15 from 'top' basically)
Total logged-in users (and privledged accounts).
Login errors.
Total Processes.
Disk Errors (s/w, h/w, transport & total) per uptime.
Corrected DIMM errors.
NIC speed & duplex "errors".
Lots of stuff from fmadm (but that might have a scripted back-end, not sure)
OBP version
Service LED on/off/change
Link status change on a NIC (up-to-down or down-to-up)
Serial Number (if it's been set in the OBP as a variable or not, we use sneep.)
Fiber HBA Link status change (just like the NICs)

Don'ts
LOM/ALOM/XSCF version
Environment/Faults as reported by the LOM/ALOM/XSCF.
SMART status of disks.

Sort-of's
CPU Temp & Internal Temp (apparantly there isn't a consistent OID for this per-platform)
Maybe a few others (I'm not at work right now)

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Hi,

The above still looks kinda general. So can I assume, looking at the above post, that a SUN V215 cannot be monitored with HP SIM in combination with ALOM and that it might be possible using SUN's SNMP Management Agent 1.6. (are the OID's <-> MIB's understood by HP SIM??).

I just came off-duty; I was able to poke around our monitoring codebase, and nothing for our HP SIM does anything with our ALOM/LOM/XSCF cards. However, we don't network the cards, so that might explain that.

I'm not sure on this (as I didn't check the agent type & version), however our setup uses the net-snmp that Sun sneakily slipped in.

I've shot an email out to our monitoring team asking for specifics. Although I didn't ask this directly, I'm under the impression that our HP SIM understands them now. However, I'm not sure if HP SIM came with that "out of the box" or not.

I'll see if I can get a hold of the 820-0540-12 doc and nail one of our monitoring guy's feet to the floor for a little Q & A session.

Just out of curiosity, can you fill in a few gaps for me?
1) Do you currently have an HP SIM installation?
2) What version(s) are you running?
3) Do you do any monitoring/alerting with anything besides HP SIM (like Nagios or HP OVO/OMW)?
4) What other Sun servers are you planning on working with besides the v215? (we have about 15 models)

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Hi,

First of all: Thank you for all the effort you put into this!

I've talked with the people that asked this and have a better picture of what they are after.

The HPSIM side of things is clear to them. One of them is very knowledgeable when it comes to this piece of software. HPSIM can catch SNMP traps and it is also possible to import MIB libraries from other platforms (in theory, he had not tried it yet). It is also the only monitoring tool that is used by them.

They were not certain about the two SUN v215 boxes (which is actually not theirs, but from one of their clients.....). Now they also know that there is no easy (ALOM <-> HPSIM) solution available, but that it is possible to set-up "normal" SNMP traps on the SUN boxes and use those.

Again: Thanks for your help.