The Need for Vendor-specific Hardware Agents

Often, the standard operating system layer is not a sufficient hardware information source and most computers require an additional manufacturer-specific agent for BPM Express for Hardware to function properly. In most cases, server vendors provide the required hardware monitoring agent for their server models.

Depending on the platform, a single agent could monitor the temperatures, fans, voltages, power supplies and RAID systems, or, the platform may require separate agents for environment and disk monitoring.

For example: The IBM Director Agent monitors and provides information about temperatures, fans, voltages, power supplies and the ServeRAID disks for IBM xSeries servers. On the other hand, the Siemens ServerView Agent only monitors the sensors on the motherboard of the server (temperatures, voltages, fans and power supplies) and so the Mylex GAM Server is required to monitor the Mylex RAID controller of the server.

Please refer to the Connector and Platform Reference Table and the platform-specific guides for further details on vendor-specific agents required by BPM Express for Hardware.