[Info-vax] Health monitoring disk members of HW RAID controllers?

[John Wallace]

On Jul 26, 3:14 pm, Rod <rreg... at dymaxion.ca> wrote:
> On Jul 21, 1:41 am, Kari Uusimäki
>
> <uusim... at exdecWITHOUTTHISfinland.org> wrote:
> > Have you tested the HP SIM (Insight Manager) with the OpenVMS agents?
> > AFAIK it should report problems with Raid Adapter disks also.
>
> One of the direct responses I received to my posting suggested
> OpenVMS System Management Homepage (SMH).
>
> http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/smh/
>
> HP System Management Homepage (HP SMH) for OpenVMS is the single
> system management solution for managing OpenVMS. HP SMH is also
> available for HP-UX, Linux and Microsoft Windows systems.
>
> The key features of HP SMH for OpenVMS are its system administration
> capabilities and its ability to display details of hardware
> attributes. The HP SMH solution provides an easy-to-use interface for
> displaying hardware fault and status monitoring, system thresholds,
> and diagnostics for an individual server by aggregating the data from
> HP web-based agents.
>
> I'm going to look into SMH, which seems to be a currently recommend
> product for such things.
>
> It can handshake with SIM, but I'm unclear about the relationship
> between the two products.
>
> I would really like a lightweight, easy-to-deploy solution, but all of
> the current offerings
> seems to be infrastructure-heavy mega-enterprise solutions.

Are you familiar with SNMP at all? Now would be a good time to get
started.

The (grossly oversimplified) general principle of lots of tools like
these is that there is a data collector (or multiple data collectors)
which talks via the Simple Network Management Protocol to another tool
(or set of tools) which monitors and records management events and
talks to the user (sometimes via a web server+browser, sometimes
something else). Although SNMP started life managing network stuff, it
has been extended and can now manage a wide variety of stuff, so long
as someone has provided the relevant SNMP functionality.

In SNMP terminology the OS-specific bit doing the collection (and the
conversion to/from SNMP messages) is called an Agent. The SMH family
seems to include a variety of Agents, and it looks hopeful that one of
them may do what you are looking for wrt disks.

If the SMH family Agents have stuck to vendor-independent SNMP
principles, or even vendor-specific principles with documented MIBs,
there are a variety of SNMP tools out there which may be able to
provide some kind of view of the data the Agents have collected. Some
of them will be relatively lightweight. Most of them won't run on VMS,
but Linux and Windows have a variety of offerings, as may other OSes.

There's a great deal more to say on the subject of SNMP, but now is
probably not the time.

One warning to add at this stage is that a lot of SNMP-centric
software seems to have originated from parts of the world where buffer
overflows are commonplace, and remote code execution and similar
security delights are consequently a bit of a concern, if security
matters to you.