In my previous post I’ve covered the configuration of the management pack for HP Enclosures. But this MP only monitors health of the enclosures and not the blade servers inside via SCOM. In order to monitor blade servers or any other standalone HP server you have to install and configure HP ProLiant Server Management Pack. Actually if you want to use HP BaldeSystem Management pack you must import HP ProLiant Server Management Pack also.
HP ProLiant Server Management Pack can monitor HP servers trough two different methods:
- SNMP method – For this method you must install HP Insight Management Agents on every server you will monitor besides the SCOM agent. This method uses SNMP to send trap messages.
- WMI method – For this method you must install HP Insight Management WBEM Providers on every server you will monitor besides the SCOM agent. This method relays on WMI service.
As I am a Windows Engineer I prefer WMI method and on this article I will cover only this way of implementation.
The guide that is provided with this management pack covers both methods and I recommend reading it. This article will walk you trough the basic actions you need to do to install and configure HP ProLiant Management Pack for SCOM:
1. First you need to download the management pack itself from here. The MP is part of HP Insight Control for Microsoft System Center solution.
2. You will download one zip file that contains – 32-bit installation file, 64-bit installation file, License agreement file, Release notes file, User Guide and Troubleshooting Guide.
3. Copy 64-bit installation (if your SCOM server is 32-bit use 32-bit installation) to your RMS server and install it. It is pretty simple installation you can leave the default options. During the installation you will be present to choose if you want to install SNMP based method, WMI based method or both. If you choose only one of the methods the installation will only import the management pack that corresponds to the chosen method. It is best to choose both because you can always switch between methods or for example you can monitor one group of servers with one method and another group with the other one.
Note In the documentation of the MP it is not mentioned that the MP requires to be installed on the RMS server. In fact the MP can be installed on any Management Server or any server that have SCOM agent installed.
4. After the installation is finished the HP ProLiant Management Pack should be imported in SCOM and HP Custom Data Manager application should be installed. This application will allow you to enter additional information (fore example end of hardware support date) for individual servers that will be populated in SCOM Database.
5. After the MPs are imported discovery of HP servers will start. Discoveries are enabled by default so there is no additional configuration there. At this step it is best to check if all your HP monitored servers have HP Insight Management WBEM Providers installed. This can be achieved by opening SCOM console and navigating to Monitoring Pane –> HP Systems –> Windows Server State. Here you can see the discovered HP Servers in your environment. Modify this view to show HP Management Version column. This will show you if SCOM agent found HP Insight Management WBEM Providers.
6. Next and final step is to configure the MP to use WMI based method. By default HP ProLiant Server MP uses SNMP based method and this can be switched to WMI by overriding a rule. To do that you have to navigate to Authoring Pane –> Management Pack Object –> Object Discoveries. There you have to look for HP ProLiant Server Discovery Rule. When you find that rule select it and right click on it. Select Overrides –> Override the Object Discovery ->For all objects of type: Windows Computer. A new dialog will appear. Select all check boxes under Override column, change the value for SNMPWMIPrefernece from SNMP to WMI and save the override to your HP ProLiant Server Management Pack for overrides.
Note If you want to switch to WMI based method only for particular servers create SCOM group and populate the group with the servers you want to monitor via that method. When you make the override in step 6 override for specific group and choose the custom created group.
7. This will switch to WMI based method for all Windows computers in your environment. After you made this setting you can again navigate to Monitoring Pane –> HP Systems –> Windows Server State.Edit the view to show Monitoring Source column. You will see your HP servers slowly switching from HP Insight Management Agents for monitoring source to HP Insight Management WBEM Providers.
After step 7 no further overrides are need in order to make HP ProLiant Server Management pack to work via WMI based method.
Cloud Administrator in Azure World 
How can i check what is configured on HP server – WBEM based or Insight Agent
Or is it both are enabled buy default during HP server Installation
I want to know what is available for these server.
Do you know what steps i can take to check on a physical server what is configured
Hi Kitaab,
By default HP ProLiant MP will monitor the servers by SNMP based agent. If you want to monitor the servers by WBEM agent you have to create one override. I think I’ve described it in my article. If you want to see by which agent is monitored the server you go in SCOM console->Monitoring pane->HP Systems -> Windows Server state view. personalize that view to see columns HP Management Version and monitoring source. The first column shows what agents are detected. The second shows which agent is active for monitoring.
Hi Stan ,
Did the SCOM management server need to configure the Device monitor console (eg. configure snmp service in SCOM Server) before it can be discover the hp system insight manager in SCOM console ?
Thanks
Hi Talmud,
SCOM is not aware of HP device monitor service. HP Device monitor service contacts SCOM and inserts the discovered objects in SCOM. Hp device monitor service does not use SNMP to discover OA objects.
Hi, as I test you post is inaccurate a little. Did you test it on clean installation or on already configured SCOM? On clean installation on clean system there is no information about Events. When I’m trying to send test event from Proliant server (Windows2012) using WBEM Test Event there is an error – root\HPQ\TestConnection error at. – so it’s not working with default configuration. Did you miss something like what have to be configured on Proliant Server side? SNMP maybe, firewall ports, other thing? BR, Ted
The MP is leveraging the SCOM agent so standard SCOM ports should be opened. In order to work with WMI method you have to install HP Insight WBEM Providers. I’ve stated that in the article. On every server you will also have HP Insight Webpage where you can see if your WBEM providers are working OK. Make sure you are also using supported for Windows Server 2012 HP Insight WBEM Providers version.
Worked as described. Thanks
Great.. this article solved my issue… I spent many 2 days resolving that issue., finally this article helped me out. thanks a lot.
I have a question.
If we can choose the discovery protocol to be either SNMP or WMI. then only the classes related to SNMP or WMI will be populated and so only the rules/monitors targeted to those classes will be functional.
Then what about the rules/monitors targeted to the other protocol class.
Is their a way we can discover classes of both SNMP and WMI and hence monitors/rules will be finctional for both SNMP and WMI?
I think this cannot be done unfortunately. If someone from HP can confirm this it will be great.
hi,
I wanted to ask if you can monitor HP servers only through HP ProLiant Server Management Pack? Is it possible to monitor HP servers for free or purchase the HP Inside Control is necessary?
Hi Tom,
You can use only the HP ProLiant Server management Pack to monitor servers. If the servers are blades it is good to monitor the enclosure also in order to have the full picture. The only requirement for HP Proliant Server MP is to have HP Insight Management Agents installed on the server. You do not need to have any HP Insight server or something. The last time I’ve checked HP ProLiant Server MP and the HP Insight Management agents can be downloaded for free. I am not expert on the HP licensing and if something has been changed but this was my understanding in the past.
hi,
Thanks for the quick reply.
To conclude:
To monitor HP servers with Windows just by HP Management Pack + Insight Management Agent + SCOM agent. Is that all?
Is to monitor HP servers running Linux and ESX also it enough?
For Windows Yes. For Linux I cannot say as I haven’t done it.
Hi Stanislav,
I can not install Insight Management Agents ver.9.40 on Win Serv 2012R2. Is there a special version for this system?
Not sure which version supports WS 2012 R2. May be try to download Insight Software and find workable version there:
https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=HPICE
Hey,
I have a theoretical question for you (sorry I’m such a nuisance 🙂
how the flow of information to the SCOM MP?
Is the HP Management Agent communicates to the SCOM Agent and this only for SCOM Management Server?
As far as I know SCOM agents picks events from even viewer logged by HP Management Agent, also picks information from WMI that is also created by HP Management Agent.
Hi, what I seem to be finding is that preference does mean preference. If SNMP is not installed on the server it will use WMI so I have found I actually have a mixed selection of servers. What I would like to ask is I find that even a hard disk failure causes only a warning alert. Is this correct?
Usually your disks will be RAID and failure of one disk doesn’t stop the server so HP decided to make that alert warning. Of course with SCOM you have the option to change it to Critical if that is the case in your environment.
Hi, thanks for your post.
I hope you are still reading.. 🙂
When i try to modify the Override to use WMI instead of SNMP i can’t see the MP for HP.
Is it because the MP is sealed?
Thanks
Hi,
Yes. You need to create your own MP to store overrides to HP Management Pack.
Thanks for your reply…
The servers are now being monitored by WMI as per your post.
1 question, all my servers are showing a healthy state but i know for a fact that some of them have RAID disk failures.
Why aren’t this being reported?
Is there anything else that needs to be configured?
Thanks
Not sure if there was such monitor. You can check what monitors and alerts are in the MP for that and which are enabled. There is possibility the monitor/rule for this to raise only warnings and not critical alerts.
Hi, according to the Monitors on:
Authoring – Management Pack Objects – Monitors – HP Proliant DL Servers
The monitors are this ones:
Shouldn’t the HP Proliant Server Storage monitos the RAID Disks?
Thanks
These are dependency monitors so they are not actual monitors. I may have a look later today in the MP to see what was in.
Thanks again…
I am trying to find any other help online, but there is not much out there other that the HP documentation which is not very easy to understand and go through.
Regards
No probs. I will use MPExplorer to find out what monitors were in the MP.
I have followed the above steps and installed HP hardware monitoring MP successfully. Servers are discovered and is monitored. But we are not receiving alerts. When I check monitor properties it shows the monitor is enabled but “Alert Generation” by default is set to False. Do we need to enable “alert Generation” to True for each and every monitor (Example: cooling, management Processor, Memory, Logs etc) for the both SMNP and WMI.
Please help and let me know if I am missing any thing.
Regards,
Sanjeev Kumar N
Hi Sanjeev,
So you’ve installed HP insight Management and the WBEM providers on your physical servers, right?
You’ve enabled the rule for WMI discovery right?
in HP Systems folder on Windows Server State do you see all your physical servers there ?
If you see them Monitoring source column should show HP Insight Management WBEM providers for all of them. The monitors that are related to WMI should also light up in green.
Hello Sir,
yes enabled WMI discovery
able to see the servers in HP System Folder out of five 2 are in green and 3 are in red. as well it displays in helath collection state view almost in green. couple of are in red. EXample: server networks, logs, management processor are in red but did not get any alert.
I have manually enabled the above monitors by going to Authoring Pane.
but still we have not received alerts for the servers which are in red.
Regards,
Sanjeev Kumar N
Those who are red there must be some monitor that is turning them red. Open the health explorer and see which is the monitor. See if that monitor generates alert. Check the Operations manager event log on your physical servers to see if you have some errors there. There could be some monitors/event rules for which alerting is not enabled. That depends from MP to MP. I currently do not have the HP MP installed somewhere so I cannot check what is in it. You have to do some troubleshooting to see if your monitoring is working accordingly. I do not think that all monitors are disabled for alerting.
I have the same Sanjeev! Alerts are not received even when an Override is in place to Alert and when an alerting condition occurs. Looking urgently for a fix!
Is all this still relevent for the latest versions of the HP Proliant MP? Is there any way to do this without having the manage HP software on each server? The documentation is extremely hard to find on HP’s site.
My information is that information is still relevant. I think that now it has agentless Management Pack for PriLiant server. My understanding is that option requires – Full support is provided for any ProLiant Gen8 server running the HP ProLiant Agentless Management Service (AMS).
Check these sties for more information. download the software itself it has the guides as well.
https://www.google.bg/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCYQFjABahUKEwikxpv2nK7IAhWC3CwKHW7HAAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fh10032.www1.hp.com%2Fctg%2FManual%2Fc03477640.pdf&usg=AFQjCNEOC3c2QuXyrLNst5iuHu3tB9Mmbw&sig2=mnoy31ae12IIH8zsTsVwvw&cad=rja
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/server-software/product-detail.html?oid=3428082#!tab=features
leaving this here in case anyone needs the software and Can’t find it. http://h20566.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=MTX_b3163ff288b24289887f5c875e