System Management and Monitoring Enhancements

System management and monitoring utilities have been enhanced as follows:

The following enhancements were made to the Nagios system monitoring utility:
- The ipmitool is now used to collect sensor data on HP Integrity hardware models
- Nagios now monitors the system event log (SEL) on systems with Integrated Lights Out (iLO) and IPMI and generates alerts based on patterns in the /opt/hptc/nagios/selRules file.
- Nagios now provides the ability to selectively archive sensor metrics.
- The /opt/hptc/nagios/etc/selRules file contains rules for matching hardware event log messages. By default, rules are applied every five minutes to messages received since the last run.
- Enhanced host checking allows Nagios to more efficiently determine host status.
- You can create a Nagios user account and UID before invoking the cluster_config utility, which greatly simplifies the account creation procedure
- By default, Nagios now uses nsca rather than ssh to forward data from Nagios monitor nodes to the Nagios master, thereby lowering system overhead and increasing efficiency.
- A mechanism has been introduced to allow the Nagios configuration to include or exclude template configuration options other then the default, nagios.
- The /opt/hptc/nagios/etc/syslogAlertRules file contains rules for matching consolidated log messages. Rules are applied every five minutes to messages received since the last run.
- A global service event handler provides the infrastructure to allow you to act on service state change events. This feature is disabled by default. To enable it, you must write event handler action scripts and installation scripts.
  For example, an event handler script can take site specific actions such as removing a node from a batch queue when specific alerts or conditions are met.
- The Nagios templates in /opt/hptc/nagios/etc/templates/*_template.cfg files can be modified to add or remove definitions.
Disk monitoring is accomplished with the smartd daemon, which monitors the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) system that is built into many ATA, IDE, and SCSI disks.
The mdadm utility monitors software RAID sets.
The RRDtool software tool is integrated into the HP XC system to create and displays graphs about the network bandwidth and other system utilization.
You can access this display by selecting HP Graph in the Nagios menu.
NRG provides status summaries using the information collected by Nagios. A non-graphical user interface provides status from the command line. You can use NRG on management_server nodes for complete system status or on management_hub nodes to report individual hub status.

All new system monitoring features are documented in the HP XC System Software Administration Guide.

System Management and Monitoring Enhancements

Technical documentation

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