HP Systems Insight Manager 6.0 User Guide

F System Type Manager rules
System Type Manager enables you to extend Systems Insight Manager's SNMP-based discovery so that it
is able to identify new types of systems. You do this by creating a System Type Manager rule that maps a
System Object ID (OID), and optionally an additional MIB variable, to the desired type. Manufacturers assign
unique System OIDs to their SNMP-instrumented products.
Systems supply information about themselves using variables described in files called MIBs. These values
are enumerated using an industry-standard structure. MIBs are provided by vendors for their systems and
must be registered with Systems Insight Manager to be accessible and usable from System Type Manager.
HP preregisters all HP MIBs and many third-party MIBs. You can register the remaining MIBs using the MIB
compiler, if you have the related systems on your network. If you examine a MIB, you will find modules, or
groups of variables. Some variables have multiple values. Each of these values has an OID as well. You can
use these OIDs to determine which system you have and its current behavior by querying these OIDs. For a
list of default MIBs supplied by Systems Insight Manager, see Out-of-the-box MIB support in Systems Insight
Manager.
You might need to enter a MIB variable OID if you have systems that return the same System OID that you
would like to classify as different products based on an SNMP variable that returns a different value for each
class. For example, if you have Windows NT servers from different vendors that return the same Windows
NT System OID, you can specify rules using the Windows NT OID as the OID and a vendor-specific MIB
variable and value combination to create separate rules for each vendor.
Adding new SNMP rules
You can create a new SNMP-based rule using the command line utility (mxstm) or by selecting
Options→Manage System Types from the Systems Insight Manager user interface. Within the SNMP
framework, manageable network systems (routers, bridges, servers, and so on) contain a software component
called a management agent . The agent monitors the various subsystems of the network element and stores
this information in a MIB. The agents enable the system to generate traps, which can be configured to be
sent to a trap destination server that is running Systems Insight Manager.
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