Monitoring Hardware Status like for example HP-SIM

We're at the moment developing a set of sensors to monitor HP Servers via snmp. One of the sensors(SNMP HP Proliant Physical Disk) will be able to monitor physical disks, including crashes etc. The new "SNMP HP Proliant System Health" Sensor will be able to monitor system health including fans, temperatures and power supplys. There will be a memory sensor aswell, but it will only monitor memory usage, not the physical modules themself.

For my organization, we deployed SIM but at this point dont really need it since we are able to use PRTG for alert us of hardware failures.

Our HP servers are primarily used for ESXi 5. During the build out of each ESXi server I downloaded, the storage drivers, offline bundle, and utilties from HP's site. The important piece here is the CIM driver/module. Getting that installed on the ESXi server allowed vCenter to see a Storage line when you are looking at the hardware status tab of the host. If you see a Storage tab in Hardware Status then creating a sensor in PRTG (Host Hardware Status - SOAP) will monitor that storage tab.

I had a hard drive failure last week on one of blade servers running ESXi and PRTG gave me all the details. Was very happy with it.

Jon

This is excellent news! Any estimate on when these sensors will be rolled out? Is there any possibility to beta test them?

Yes, there is. We do offer the download of our Canary version, that contains all the new stuff. We do strongly recommend not to use the canary channel on your production system.

You can install PRTG as freeware version on a new system or vm and then go to "Setup" -> "System Administration" -> "System & Website" and change the "Release Channel" to "Canary". Now go to "Setup" -> "Software Auto Update" to download and install the latest Canary version.

There should now be new sensors available:

• SNMP HP Proliant System Health
• SNMP HP Proliant Network Interface
• SNMP HP Proliant Physical Disk
• SNMP Disk Free
• SNMP Memory

The last two are not HP only, but they are supported by HP.

We do also offer a devicetemplate "HP Proliant", to support the Auto Discovery.

Please give us some feedback, as soon as you are done testing. We are interested in your experiences, especially with the Network Interface sensor.

When will the sensors be available in the stable release?

We won't promise anything, but we hope we will manage to release them in October or early November in the stable version.

Any news on when these sensors will be included in the stable release? These sensors would be enormously important for us (especially Proliant Physical Disk) and are at the moment what is holding us back from purchasing a license.

Also, if I want to copy the Physical disk sensor from one probe to another, it will not work because it is named by the serial number of the disk. This makes it necessary to manually set up disk discovery for each new server. I'm looking at deploying these sensors on 100 servers which would be enormously time consuming. Is there possibly a workaround?

The sensors got delayed a bit, which can happen, and which is why we don't promise or guarantee ETAs on such things. Please bear with us, the sensors should get into the stable-channel still this year.
We will check about the serial-number issue.

That's understandable. What would be the risks in deploying these sensors in a production environment? I'm currently testing these sensors in the 10-sensor freeware edition and sofar I've had no stability issues as far as I can see.

Basically, the Canary channel contains a lot of "work in progress" and although it may run fine, particularly when only using one sensor type, it is a test channel. As such, the Canary channel may include modifications / implementations that are in a testing phase, for which we cannot guarantee stability. The risk in such an instance would be that monitoring could be interrupted, that specific elements of PRTG might not function correctly, etc. Please bear in mind this does not only affect new sensor types but the overall functionality of PRTG.

If I were to use the Canary channel to create the physical disk sensors and then change the setting to stable, would this be a workaround until these sensors are released in the Stable channel?

Also, if you need any additional info regarding the serial number issue when creating Proliant Physical Disk sensors, please let me know.

Switching between the channels won't work. If you add a sensor that is only available in canary and then switch to stable, this sensor will disappear. We will release a new preview within the next days, that contains the new sensors. You might want to consider using this new Preview Version.

Excellent, thanks

As for cloning/cloning such an HP Physical Disk Sensor to several targets we strongly recommend to use Device Templates. You could create an empty device only add this sensor to the device and then create a template from this (and then use this template on all devices that shall have the sensor added).