How it Works

BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware is a PM that enables BMC Portal to monitor computer hardware (disk status, temperatures, CPU, power supplies etc).

It gathers hardware information from different sources such as manufacturer-specific agents, standard management technologies, SNMP, WBEM, etc., and displays this information within the Portal environment.

In order to work properly, BPM Express for Hardware needs certain hardware information sources to be available. Depending on the platform, it relies on the manufacturer-specific instrumentation layer and/or on standard management technology such as WBEM or SNMP. On startup, BPM Express for Hardware automatically detects which hardware information source is available and then uses this to poll data on the hardware health of the computer. BPM Express for Hardware collects such data from each server and reports it in your Portal console.

Monitoring hardware with BPM Express for Hardware

Overview of the mechanism of BPM Express for Hardware

•The Siemens® ServerView® agent shows the temperatures, the fans, the power supplies and the voltages of the Siemens computer through SNMP

•The Mylex® GAM Server shows the status of the physical and logical disks of the Mylex RAID Controller through SNMP

•The Windows WMI provider shows the status of the physical disks attached to the standard SCSI controller through WBEM

•BPM Express for Hardware detects and automatically connects to all three information sources (Siemens ServerView, Mylex GAM Server and Windows WMI provider).

•BPM Express for Hardware gathers only useful hardware information from these sources and displays it within the Portal framework

This is just an example of the basic mechanism of BPM Express for Hardware and is applicable to IBM, NEC, HP and all other supported computers as well.

Related Topics

Architecture

Connector and Platform Reference Table

The Basics

The need for Vendor-specific Hardware Monitoring Software