Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Managing and Monitoring Data Center Assets with Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials This Dell Technical White Paper addresses integration of Dell KACE K1000 appliance with OpenManage Essentials (OME) and how Dell KACE and OME can play an important role of managing and monitoring data center assets in a simple, cost-effective solution to bring fault resolution in a quick and proactive manner.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials This document is for informational purposes only and may contain typographical errors and technical inaccuracies. The content is provided as is, without express or implied warranties of any kind. © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell and its affiliates cannot be responsible for errors or omissions in typography or photography. Dell, the Dell logo, and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. Intel and Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Contents Executive summary ..................................................................................................... 3 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 4 Inventorying and managing data center assets .................................................................... 6 Managing system updates ..............................................................................
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials As part of OME and KACE K1000 Service Desk integration, users need to: Configure e-mail alert action in OME that gets triggered when an alert is received (based on filters set, including Alert Severity, Alert Category, Device/Device group). Configure Service Desk in the KACE K1000 appliance to parse the e-mail received from OME and create a trouble ticket. Validate the configuration by sending a test e-mail from OME.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials acquire and easily adopted by existing staff. Deployment of these management tools should minimize investment in time and resources and quantitatively return that investment quickly. In this whitepaper, we will address these questions with Dell’s innovative approach to systems management.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials System Monitoring and Fault Resolution—The Dell OpenManage Essentials toolset provides active system monitoring via SNMP and IPMI, and delivers issues that have been identified for remediation to the Dell|KACE service desk for ownership assignment and resolution. Reporting on Data Center Assets and Activities—Extensive reporting capabilities are provided to track progress and validate processes.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials assets such as printers, network devices, and virtualization hosts can be loaded into the K1000 Asset Management module. Figure 3. Dell|KACE K1000 system inventory Figure 4.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Using the Managed Installation functionality of the K1000, the OMSA agent may be installed on multiple machines, greatly simplifying the deployment of the overall solution. The managed installation will transfer the installation package for OMSA to the target servers and execute the installation using the supplied installation parameters as shown below: Figure 5.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Figure 6. Custom inventory with Dell CIM In the above example, the Dell WMI namespace is accessed to retrieve information about the out-ofband management facilities of the Dell Remote Access Controller (DRAC), allowing the administrator to quickly identify and access a remote console for the server and control power management, BIOS settings, and other options even if the operating system on the server is not available.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Figure 8. Attaching a machine action to enable OMSA or DRAC As changes occur to the system over time, these changes are recorded in the asset history of the system within the K1000 inventory, providing a single location to review what’s been altered, when, and by whom. Figure 9.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials shutdown and recovery options, chassis configurations, asset management, and power management and monitoring. For example, SNMP events may be enabled or disabled for specific event types (e.g. power supplies, redundancy, temperature, fans, voltage, system power, memory, chassis intrusion, battery, and logs) and severity levels.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials and firmware comparison reporting by each individual machine or across a range of machines in the environment While a choice will typically be made to use the Dell Update Center processes exclusively from either OME or the K1000, that choice can be driven by the needs of the environment rather than any incremental costs to the solution since both offerings provide Dell Update Center integration as part of their core functionality. Figure 11.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Assessments may be applied across multiple machines using the same dynamic grouping mechanism available to all features of the K1000, allowing scanning schedules to account more frequently for those systems that are of highest concern. When vulnerabilities are identified, patching and system configuration changes for the affected system may be addressed directly within the appliance. Figure 13.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials System monitoring and fault resolution Possibly the most important task to be automated is proactive identification of faults within the systems being monitored, and tracking of the fault remediation to its conclusion. OME provides active monitoring of Dell and non-Dell computer systems and other devices via industry-standard SNMP and IPMI protocols.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Figure 16. Delivering alerts to the K1000 appliance When configuring the Alert Action in OME, the administrator has options for filtering the alerts to only those that require action, and defining which attributes of the alert need to be transferred to the service desk in the K1000 so the assigned administrator may resolve the issue. Alerts may be filtered based on the severity of the event, user-defined alert category, device type, and time of the event.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Date and Time ($d and $t)—The date and time of the alert event. Severity ($sev)—The severity of the event (Normal, Warning, Critical, Unknown). Alert Category Name ($ct) – The category of the alert. Several default values are preconfigured and more may be configured within OME. Alert Source Name ($st)—The source of the alert. Package Name ($pkn)—The package associated with the alert event.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Figure 17. Ticket for an alert in the K1000 service desk Working together, OME and the K1000 provide an end-to-end solution for proactively identifying and resolving issues within the environment. Reporting on data center assets and activities Delivering effective reporting to the IT team and to management communicate issues that may impact priorities and illustrates successful and timely execution of processes.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Figure 18. Figure 19.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Integrating Dell K1000 with OME The features of the Dell|KACE K1000 Systems Management Appliance are exceptionally well suited to manage a distributed desktop environment.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Figure 20. OpenManage Essentials discovery range configuration wizard Configure service desk and service queue in KACE The next step is to create your K1000 service desk queue so it can receive emails from OME. We’ll set this up before configuring the email alert in OME since we need the email address for the service desk queue to complete the OME configuration.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Figure 21. Import resources from SAMBA share directory 1. Select Queue-110.kpkg from the list of files, and then select Import Resources. You’ll now see a queue resource listed called OME that is imported into your K1000 Appliance. 2. Navigate to Service Desk Configuration Queues. Click on the OME queue. Figure 22.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Note the email address of the queue. This is the email address that will be recognized within the K1000 Appliance as the queue to receive email tickets from OME. If you wish to use a different email address that is first externally defined in your email environment and then forwarded to this address, you may specify that in the Alt. Email Address field. Here, though, we’ll assume that the queues Email Address is being used.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Figure 23. Define custom fields and parameters on the service desk configuration page You can configure a new Alert Category in K1000 to match alert categories supported by OME. Alert category identifies the type of device, component, or application that generated the alert. For example, temperature-related alerts will be under the Environmental alert category. To configure the Alert Category, select Service Desk Configuration Queues Ticket.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Create an e-mail alert action in OME 1. Launch the OME console and select Manage Alerts then in the left pane, select Alert Actions Email 2. Right-click on Email and select New Email Alert Action OR right-click a pre-canned sample alert action and select Clone then provide a new name and select Edit from the right-click menu of the cloned alert action. Figure 24. Figure 25.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Figure 26. Enter and edit a new name for the cloned e-mail alert action 3. In Name and Description, provide e-mail alert action name and description. 4. Check Enabled checkbox and Click Next. Figure 27.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials 5. In the e-mail configuration screen, provide the recipients of this e-mail and sender in To: and From: address fields. NOTE: Make sure the To e-mail address in OME matches the e-mail address in KACE Service Desk configuration. NOTE: Verify that the e-mail address in the From field in OME (user sending the ticket into the K1000 service queue) matches exactly the e-mail address defined for that user in the KACE appliance.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Figure 28. E-mail configuration in e-mail alert action wizard Note: The address in the To: field will be the e-mail address of the service queue in the K1000 Appliance where the service desk tickets will be logged.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Figure 29. Figure 30.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials 11. In Severity Association, assign the alert severity to which you want to associate this e-mail alert and then click Next. Figure 31.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials 12. In Categories and Sources Association, assign the alert categories source to which you want to associate this e-mail alert and then click Next. Figure 32.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials 13. In Device Association, assign the device or device groups to which you want to associate this email alert and then click Next. Figure 33.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials 14. In Date Time Association, enter the date or time range on when this e-mail alert action is active, and then click Next. By default, the e-mail alert action created is active at all times. Figure 34.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials 15. In the Summary window, review inputs and click Finish. Figure 35.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Sample workflow of OME/KACE integration 1. OME receives a critical alert from a monitored server and triggers the E-mail alert action, which in turn collects alert data and sends an e-mail to KACE service desk. Figure 36. Alerts received in OME Home Portal dashboard 2. The E-mail received is parsed by KACE Service Desk. It then creates a Service Desk ticket under OME service queue based on the criteria set. Figure 37.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials 3. Click on the service desk ticket to view the details. Figure 38.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Conclusion Users can have both OME and the KACE K1000 Appliance running on the same physical machine. This can be achieved by having multiple virtual machines (VMs) on the same physical hypervisor system, where one of the VMs will have OME installed and the other VM houses the K1000 virtual appliance. By adding OME—a simple free solution to your environment—you can provide hardware monitoring within your KACE environment without impacting your budget.
Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials Additional resources Dell OpenManage Essentials For more information on Dell OpenMange Essentials visit www.dell.com/ome or www.delltechcenter.com/ome Dell OpenManage Administrator Dell OpenManage is a collection of software tools developed by Dell that helps you discover, monitor, manage, and update Dell servers. Documentation and downloads for OpenManage Server Administrator may be found at http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/systems-management/w/wiki/1760.
