HP Operations Smart Plug-in for Systems Infrastructure Release Notes

for HP Operations Manager for Windows®, HP-UX, Linux, and Solaris operating systems

Software version: 1.60

Publication date: October 2010

This document is an overview of the features in HP Operations Smart Plug-in for Systems Infrastructure (Systems Infrastructure SPI). It contains important information that is not included in the manuals or the online help. This release notes is applicable for both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. Information specific to 64-bit systems is highlighted in bold-italics.

You can find information about the following in this document:

What's New in This Release?
Supported Environments
Installation Notes
Enhancements and Fixes
Known Problems, Limitations, and Workarounds
Documentation Updates
Support
Legal Notices

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What's New in This Release?

HP Operations Smart Plug-in for Systems Infrastructure contains new features, feature enhancements, and defect fixes.

New Features

The Systems Infrastructure SPI version 1.60 contains these new features:

• New platforms supported on management server
  This version of Infrastructure SPIs extends the support on HPOM for Windows 9.0 on Windows 2008 (64-bit) servers, HPOM for Solaris, and HP Operations Manager i (HP OMi) in addition to the existing support on HPOM for Windows, HP-UX, and Linux.
  To monitor using Infrastructure SPI 1.60 for 64-bit servers, on HPOM for Windows 9.0 on Windows 2008 (64-bit) servers:
  1. Install Infrastructure SPI for 64-bit servers
  2. Install the Infrastructure SPI hotfix for HPOM-Windows 9.00. Contact HP Support to obtain the hotfix.
• New platforms supported on managed nodes
  This version of Infrastructure SPIs extends the support on AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris in addition to the existing support on Windows and Linux.
• Localization Support
  This version of Infrastructure SPIs supports Japanese and Simplified Chinese locales on HPOM for Windows.
• HP OMi Content Pack for Infrastructure
  This version of Infrastructure SPIs includes HP OMi content pack for Infrastructure. For more information, see HP Operations Manager i Content Pack for Infrastructure Release Notes.
• New policies, Reports, and Graphs for Systems Infrastructure SPI
  This version of Systems Infrastructure SPI contains new policies, reports, and graphs. For more information, see HP Operations Smart Plug-in for Systems Infrastructure User Guide.

Enhancements and Changes

The Systems Infrastructure SPI version 1.60 contains these enhancements and changes:

• Enhancements for Policy Grouping
  • New policy grouping based on operating systems and vendors is introduced in addition to the monitored aspect based grouping.
  • After installation of Infrastructure SPIs 1.60, the policies appear under the current version number on the HPOM console. The policies for version 1.60 will appear under v1.60 in the console. On a system where the SPIs are upgraded, the existing policies for version 1.00 will be grouped under v1.00 in the console. For more information, see HP Operations Infrastructure Smart Plug-ins Installation Guide.
  • The policy group name SPI for infrastructure on HPOM console is changed to Infrastructure Management.
• Changes in Tracing
  
  • The discovery policy is enhanced to send out appropriate messages to the HPOM console when discovery fails. These messages specify the problem and resolution on how to fix the issue.
  • This version of Infrastructure SPIs consolidates the trace options. The trace flag can be set to any of three options: no trace messages, send trace messages to console, and log trace messages in a file.
• Changes in Node Group Layout
  The node group layout has been enhanced to provide more meaningful node group names and the groups have been re-organized for easy navigation on HPOM for HP-UX, Linux, and Solaris operating systems.
• Changes in Message Groups
  This version of Infrastructure SPIs adds new message groups OS and HA for Infrastructure SPIs version 1.60 messages, while retaining the earlier message groups System and Clusters.

For information about customer-related enhancements and software fixes, see Enhancements and Fixes.

Supported Environments

Before installing the Systems Infrastructure SPI, make sure that your system meets the following minimum requirements for HPOM management server and managed nodes.

To know about the supported operating system architectures, supported operating system release versions, and for recent updates, go to the support matrix URL:HP Software Support Matrix.

Management server requirements:

The Infrastructure SPIs are supported on the following versions of HPOM, HP Performance Manager, and HP Reporter on the management server.

Managed node requirements:

The Infrastructure SPIs are supported on Windows, AIX, Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris operating systems.

Install the latest available Agent patches on the management server. To know more about the required patches, visit the HP Support web site at: HP Software Support Online.

* Infrastructure SPI does not support HP Performance Agent versions earlier than version 5.00.

Supported operating system platforms on the managed nodes:

Installation Notes

Installation requirements, as well as instructions for installing the Smart Plug-in for Systems Infrastructure are documented in the HP Operations Smart Plug-ins for Infrastructure Installation Guide provided in PDF (.pdf) format.

Enhancements and Fixes

The following items (identified by reference number) are fixed in the current software release. You can view details about each software enhancement or fix using the reference number from the HP Software Support Online. You need a HP passport to access this web site. To set up your passport profile, go to: HP Support.

QCCR1A102949: SI-SwapCapacityMonitor shows wrong message text for the configured swap space.

Fix: The SI-SwapCapacityMonitor policy is updated to display correct swap space.

Known Problems, Limitations, and Workarounds

The known problems and workarounds for this release of Systems Infrastructure SPI are listed below:

• QCCR1A114326 (for 64-bit only)

  Problem: Auto-Addition of nodes does not work on HPOM for Windows 9.00. Due to this the nodes do not get auto-added in the console's Nodes list and the quickstart policies do not get auto-deployed.
  

  Workaround: Install the Infrastructure SPI hotfix for HPOM-Windows 9.00. Contact HP Support to obtain the hotfix.

• QCCR1A94794(for 64-bit only)

  Problem: The SI-MsWindowsRemoteDrivesSpaceUtilization policy does not send alerts about remote drives connected to Windows 2008 x64 nodes.

  Cause: The HP Operations agent processes, by default, run under the local system account. On Windows 2008, the local system account has no network privileges. Therefore, policies requiring network privileges fail.

  Workaround: You can do one of the following:

  • Run the agent under a user with the required network privileges.
  • Run the policy under a user with the required network privileges.

• QCCR1A105913(for 64-bit only)

  Problem: On HPOM for Windows 9.0 installed on Windows 2008 (64-bit) servers, the Infrastructure SPI 1.6 installation takes more than 60 minutes.

  Workaround: Set the proxy for the SYSTEM user on the HPOM server because the Infrastructure SPI runs the HPOM for Windows scripts as SYSTEM. The syntax to set the proxy is:

  Windows 2008:
  netsh winhttp set proxy [proxy-server=] <ProxyServerName> [bypass-list=] <HostsList>

  Windows 2003:
  proxycfg -d -p <ProxyServerName> "<Hostlist>"

• QCCR1A110089(for 64-bit only)

  Problem: Infrastructure SPI policies do not get deployed automatically on Windows 2008 R2 nodes.

  Workaround: Manually deploy the policies to the Windows 2008 R2 node group listed under Nodes > HP Defined Groups in the HPOM management console.

• QCCR1A102540

  Problem: NIC Ids mismatch in the discovered NIC services and alert messages. This causes incorrect update in the service map state when alerts related to a particular NIC are received.

• QCCR1A105116

  Problem: Unable to upload Chinese policies to Simplified Chinese HPOM for Windows 8.16 server.

• QCCR1A104990

  Problem: Unable to deploy Japanese policy to a Japanese locale node from Chinese HPOM for Windows 8.16 server.

• QCCR1A91176

  Problem: Monitoring for special Windows server 2008 Event logs needed.

• QCCR1A95885

  Problem: Systems Infrastructure SPI on Win2k8 x64/ IA64 has the following known limitations:

  • Alert message attributes, message group, and message text of SI-CPUSpikeCheck and SI-CPUBottleneckDiagnosis policies have unresolved variable name <$SESSION(MessageGroup)>  on Win2k8 IA64 node.
  • Infrastructure SPIs Measurement Threshold policies(SI-CPUSpikeCheck, SI-MemoryBottleneckDiagnosis, and SI-CPUBottleneckDiagnosis) that use perl modules like OvTrace.pm, OvPrum.pm, etc do not work on x64 systems.

• QCCR1A105999

  Problem: Monitor Agent (opcmona) gets aborted when Infrastructure SPIs policies are deployed on the node.

• QCCR1A105359

  Problem: EPC shows a negative value for packet out rate due to which false alerts are received from the SI-NetworkUsageAndPerformance policy.

• QCCR1A104620

  Problem:. The SI-DiskCapacityMonitor policy sends an alarm on 100% disk space utilization of mounted ISO files on HP-UX managed node.

• QCCR1A96995

  Advanced Monitoring policies modified in HPOM for UNIX Admin GUI fail to run after deployment to managed nodes. When advanced monitoring policies are edited in GUI mode in HPOM for UNIX policy editor, syntax errors are induced into the Perl code module. This causes the policy to fail to execute. Errors such as the following appear:

  "An error occurred in the processing of the policy 'SI-LinuxSshdProcessMonitor'. Please check the following errors and take corrective actions. (OpC30-797)
  Error during evaluation of threshold level "Processes - Fill Instance list" (OpC30-728)
  Execution of instance filter script failed. (OpC30-714)
  Perl Script execution failed: syntax error at PerlScript line 11, near "1
  
  #BEGIN_PROCESSES_LIST
  #ProcName=/usr/sbin/sshd
  #Params=
  #Params=
  #MonMode=>=
  #ProcNum=1
  #END_PROCESSES_LIST
  @ProcNames"
  Missing right curly or square bracket at PerlScript line 17, within string
  syntax error at PerlScript line 17, at EOF
  . (OpC30-750)"

  The un-edited advanced monitoring policies (Measurement Threshold type) work fine when deployed from HPOM for UNIX.

  Workaround: To edit the settings in the Measurement Threshold policy, use ‘Edit in Raw mode’ feature of the HPOM for UNIX Admin GUI to change the policy contents. This requires you to know the syntax of the policy data file.

• QCCR1A95505

  HPOM Monitor Agent’s memory usage increases to the point where the system runs out of memory and the monitor agent aborts. The opcmona has memory leak while processing policies with embedded perl script. The issue is more prone to occur when you deploy many (30 or more) advanced monitoring policies using embedded Perl scripts.

• Enabling alerts for Log monitoring policies for RHEL and SLES on managed nodes running agent as non-root user

  Systems Infrastructure SPI supports policies and tools for alternative, non-root user on HTTPS agents. The following policies fail to work on RHEL and SLES systems:

  • SI-LinuxBootLog
  • SI-LinuxSecureLog
  • SI-LinuxKernelLog

  To enable alerts for log monitoring for Infrastructure SPIs on non root agents follow these steps::

  1. Change the Permission of the required log files with the following command:

  For RHEL:
  chmod 444 /var/log/messages
  chmod 444 /var/log/boot.log
  chmod 444 /var/log/secure

  For SLES:
  chmod 444 /var/log/messages
  chmod 444 /var/log/boot.log

  Doing this will enable users to read the logs and help to generate alerts.

  2. Change the permission of OVBBCCB and OPCLE process with the following command:

     chmod 4555 /opt/OV/bin/ovbbccb
     chmod 4555 /opt/OV/lbin/eaagt/opcle

  3. Switch to Non-root user by running the following command:
     

     su - <non-root user name>

  4. Restart ovc by running the following commands:

     ovc -stop
     ovc -start

  5. To check the status of all process, run the command OVC. It displays all process up and running, without any process shown as aborted.

• Ctrl-M (^M) characters appear in instrumentation scripts for Infrastructure SPI policies making it difficult to edit on non-Windows systems.

  Workaround: Before you edit or customize the instrumentation scripts, remove the Ctrl-M(^M) characters using standard OS commands.

Limitation (for 64-bit only)

HP Reporter is not supported on HPOM for Windows 9.00 (64-bit), therefore, do not install the Infrastructure SPI reports package on HPOM for Windows 9.00 (64-bit). You must install the reporter package only on 32-bit systems where HP Reporter is installed.

Documentation Updates

The following documentation is available for Systems Infrastructure SPI:

• HP Operations Smart Plug-ins for Infrastructure Installation Guide
• HP Operations Smart Plug-ins for Infrastructure Concepts Guide
• HP Operations Smart Plug-in for System Infrastructure SPI Online help
• HP Operations Smart Plug-in for System Infrastructure SPI User Guide

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