HP ML350 HP Insight Management Agents architecture for Windows servers - Page 8

Performing SNMP Sets SNMP Sets are used to define the alerting thresholds for management information or to set SNMP configuration information. Because these operations are considered sensitive, the Insight Management architecture does not send SNMP Sets over the open SNMP connection between SIM and the managed server. Instead, they are sent over the secure https channel link that SIM establishes with the System Management Homepage framework. These Set requests are then sent to the Microsoft SNMP Agent Service which passes them to the appropriate HP SNMP Extension Agent and then to an Insight Management Agent. In the HP Insight Management Agents architecture, all SNMP Sets are passed to and executed locally by the Foundation Agent as part of its extended functionality. Monitoring the server and delivering SNMP Traps One function of a management system is to deliver alerts whenever the values for key system parameters exceed or fall below the threshold values that have been set for them, or whenever important system events occur. For example, a system administrator may want to be alerted whenever disk utilization exceeds 85%. The Insight Management Agents architecture uses SNMP Trap notifications to deliver these alerts to the SIM server, where they are processed and then displayed for the system administrator on the SIM console. Several different components of the Insight Management architecture, including parts of each of the four Insight Agents, monitor the MIB and process the information to determine when to issue alerts.  Remote Alerter Threads. Each Insight Management agent has a remote alerter thread that is responsible for monitoring its portion of the HP MIB in the Windows Registry for Registry change events. When the thread detects a change that requires an alert, such as a threshold being exceeded, it writes an event to the Windows Event Log with a pre-defined Event ID.  The HP Trap Thread. This extension to the Microsoft SNMP Agent Service scans the Windows Event Log for alert events that have been written to it by the Remote Alerter Threads. It also detects other key events in the log that should generate an alert.  The Microsoft SNMP Agent Service. Based on the events selected by the HP Trap Thread, the SNMP Agent Service generates the actual SNMP Traps that are sent to the SIM server for display on the management console. The Insight Manager alerting architecture is shown in Figure 2. This is a slightly more detailed view of one section of the overall Insight Agents architecture shown in Figure 1. 8