HP Server Automation complements HP Insight Control to manage HP BladeSystem servers (487616-001, February 2008)

Example 1: Solving a CPU
performance problem
Keeping hundreds or thousands of
server
blade
s
running on an ongoing basis would be difficult
without automation tools.
These automation tools can
manage large numbers of servers from a sin
gle
console
.
Insight Control and Server Automation reduce the effort required to do this.
In general,
Insight Control monitors,
manages,
and controls the server hardware
,
and Server Automation monitors
the software configuration compliance, yielding a comp
lete picture.
In this example, the system administrator is using HP
SIM
, the foundation of Insight Control, for health
monitoring and fault management.
A pager alert is received from HP SIM indicating that one of the
servers has gone over its CPU threshol
d.
The system administrator uses
the
real time graphing
capability
of PMP
to confirm that this system is consistently running at a higher CPU level than it
should be for that time of day.
A quick look at the Compliance Dashboard in Server Automation
shows
that Oracle configuration
for this server
is out of compliance.
To reinstate the original
configuration values, t
he system administrator
clicks
Remediate
.
PMP confirms that the system is
returning to its expected CPU usage levels.
Event and
health monitor
ing
In this data
center, the system administrator routinely monitors the infrastructure using HP
SIM
.
HP SIM
polls each managed server periodically to retrieve a consolidated health status value that reflects the
status of the server’s hardware components.
This health status value can be displayed in several
places in the HP SIM user interface, and is used to access more detailed information about the health
of the system.
SNMP and WBEM events can be directed to the HP SIM central management server,
where a
ctions such as e
-
mail notifications, paging, script
execution,
and event assignment can be
automated, and event details can be viewed.
In this example, the system administrator had
configured HP SIM to send a pager alert when certain production servers exc
eed a CPU threshold.
After HP SIM sends
the pager alert,
the administrator
consults HP SIM to start
diagnosing the
problem.
Figure
4
shows an HP SIM table view of a collection of ProLiant servers.
The
HS
(Health St
atus) column
represents health status for an individual
system
, and the
ES
(Event Status) column represents the most
critical, uncleared event that
the system
has received for that
system
.
The
SW
column reflects
recommended updates to ProLiant drivers, fir
mware
,
and management agents. Other status columns
reflect additional information in areas such as management processor status and performance.
The
Events
tab gives quick access to an event viewer and displays a filtered view of the events for this
collect
ion of systems, showing additional event details that
might
not have been included in the page
notification.