HP Systems Insight Manager 6.2 User Guide

2 Product overview
Systems Insight Manager features
• Automatic discovery Automatically discovers and identifies systems attached to the network. Use
discovery filters to prevent discovery of unwanted system types.
• Health monitoring Colored status icons enable you to see at a glance the operational health of your
systems, and quickly drill down to find the failing component if any are not ok.
• Fault management and event handling Systems Insight Manager provides proactive notification of
actual or impending component failure alerts. Automatic Event Handling enables you to configure
actions to notify appropriate users of failures through e-mail or pager, , and enables automatic execution
of scripts or event forwarding to enterprise platforms such as HP Operations Manager or HP Network
Node Manager.
NOTE: Pager support is only for Windows-based Central Management Server (CMS) .
• Inventory Performs comprehensive system data collection and enables users to quickly produce
detailed inventory reports for managed systems . Save reports in multiple formats for easy incorporation
into popular reporting packages.
• Consistent multisystem management Systems Insight Manager initiates a task on multiple systems or
nodes from a single command on the CMS. This functionality eliminates the need for tedious, one-at-a-time
operations performed on each system.
• Role-based security Allows effective delegation of management responsibilities by giving systems
administrators granular control over which management operations users can perform on selected
systems.
• Two user interfaces Systems Insight Manager provides the option of a browser-based GUI or a
command line interface (CLI) that enables you to incorporate Systems Insight Manager into your existing
management processes.
• Customized tools Simple Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents that enable you to integrate
off-the-shelf or custom command line and web-based applications or scripts into the Systems Insight
Manager user interface.
Basic concepts
Discovery and identification
Systems Insight Manager can automatically discover and identify systems attached to the network using
information from management protocols such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Windows
Management Instrumentation (WMI), WBEM, Secure Shell (SSH), and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Create
discovery tasks to limit discovery to specific network segments or IP address ranges, or to control the frequency
that each task runs. Use discovery filters to prevent discovery of unwanted system types.
Inventory
Data collection gathers data that can be used for reporting and to populate various fields in the user interface.
Systems Insight Manager collects various information such as system type and sub-type, supported protocols,
and available memory. You can choose to maintain only the most recent data, enabling you to run reports
or compare different systems using Snapshot Comparison. Or, you can store all data collected over time,
which enables use of Snapshot Comparison to view trends on a single system.
Status info
The following status icons are used in the status list columns to show status on different aspects of the managed
systems. For example, the MP column displays the status icon of the management processor if the system
has a management processor board installed.
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