HP ProLiant DL380p HP Insight Management Agents architecture for Windows serve - Page 2

Abstract This technology brief provides an overview of the HP Insight Management Agents for HP ProLiant servers running the Windows® server operating system. It is intended to provide an architectural overview of the entire set of client-side software components that are installed on ProLiant servers to provide integrated manageability using the HP Systems Insight solution. It is assumed that the reader is already familiar with HP Systems Insight Manager (HPSIM) in managed server environments. Introduction to the Insight Management Agents architecture HP Insight Management Agents provide a robust and unique solution for monitoring and managing ProLiant servers through HP Systems Insight Manager. To provide this functionality, which extends beyond that of simple SNMP-based management, the Insight Management Agents architecture requires the installation of a set of software components on each managed server. Although they are commonly referred to as the Insight Management Agents, it is instructive to think of these as three different groups of software components, each performing a core function in the overall Insight Manager architecture. The first group consists of the Insight agents themselves. There are four different agents in the Insight architecture for Windows-based servers. As a group they are responsible for collecting all of the management information about the server. This information is eventually reported and displayed in the Systems Insight Manager console and the System Management Homepage. This includes information about the server's health, key operating system statistics, and information about the server hardware. The Microsoft SNMP Agent Service is the second component of this architecture. This program provides the basic set of SNMP services between the managed server and HP SIM. The third and final component group on the managed server is the System Management Homepage (SMH) framework. In addition to acting as a web server to deliver detailed information on the managed server as part of the SIM console, it also implements the core functionality that makes unique SIM features such as single sign-on and replicate agents settings possible. Figure 1 shows an overview of the Insight Management Agents architecture and the basic interoperation of the component groups. The sections that follow describe the roles of each of the components in the Insight Management architecture and provide more details about the architecture itself. 2