HP ProLiant DL140 HP Insight Diagnostics Online Edition Featuring Survey Utili - Page 4

Importance of Service Tools What is the Insight Diagnostics Online Edition? How Insight Diagnostics Online Edition Works Combining today's complex business environment with shrinking administration budgets and staff means not only must servers be highly available, but tools must be available to make system administrators more efficient. Effective service tools are as important as ongoing management tools in meeting this objective. Service tools ensure that if a problem occurs, it will be resolved quickly and easily so the server can continue to support users and applications. System administrators encounter a number of challenges in managing their environments. As a result of these challenges, specific requirements have emerged in terms of improving serviceability. The primary requirements for service tools include: • Providing online functionality to identify and resolve problems without taking the server offline • Simplifying the process of gathering the information required to effectively resolve service cases • Delivering automatic configuration tracking and audit trail history that are accessible on demand Fulfilling all of these requirements results in: • Faster problem resolution times • Minimized administration costs and resources • Higher server availability The Insight Diagnostics Online Edition was designed to address these user requirements and deliver the benefits of higher availability and minimized costs. The Insight Diagnostics Online Edition is an integrated Web-enabled management agent accessible from the server's System Management Homepage. As a management agent, Version Control Repository Manager (VCRM) and Version Control Agent (VCA), allow version control of Insight Diagnostics Online Edition. VCRM integration with Systems Insight Manager provides proactive notification when the diagnostics require upgrading. Insight Diagnostics Online Edition is a powerful troubleshooting tool for IT administrators and service providers. Typical uses of the Insight Diagnostics Online Edition include: • Gathering critical hardware and operating system configuration information which allows the administrator to analyze and troubleshoot an active or downed server. • Documenting server configurations for upgrade planning, standardization, inventory tracking, disaster recovery, and maintenance. • Comparing historical configurations on the server or another (baseline) server. • Sending configuration information to a service center or service provider for in-depth troubleshooting during a service call. • Automating configuration history and audit trail reporting to maintain snapshots of prior configuration information. The Insight Diagnostics Online Edition agent runs on each managed server and communicates with device drivers in the system to capture detailed information. This communication, or interaction, includes capturing data from sources such as the file systems, the system BIOS, SCSI drivers, disk array drivers, the Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), the Windows Registry, and the health driver. This enables the