Hardware Sentry KM for PATROL

Release Notes for v1.9.00

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What's New

Hardware Sentry KM for PATROL 1.9.00 is fully configurable within the BMC ProactiveNet Central Monitoring Administration environment.
Blade monitoring: A new parameter (PowerState) has been added to the MS_HW_BLADE application class to indicate whether a Cisco UCS blade chassis is currently On or Off.
Reporting: The reporting feature has been completely reorganized. Hardware Inventory Reports can now be generated daily. Also, it is now possible to generate Ethernet/Fiber Port Activity and Energy Usage reports (as csv files).
Alert actions: Hardware problems and connector failures can now trigger different types of PATROL events.
SNMP queries: SNMP queries can now be performed on a specified SNMP Port, rather than the default 161 port.

New Supported Platforms

Hardware Sentry KM for PATROL 1.9.00 now supports the two following platforms:

DataDirect Networks Storage Appliances via SNMP.
Quantum (ADIC) Enterprise Level Scalar Tape Libraries via SNMP. Note that the successful activation of this connector will automatically disable the SMI-S based monitoring method.

Changes and Enhancements

Improved Platforms Support

IBM v7000 Unified Disk System (using SSH): The product now reports on physical disks, batteries, LEDs (Canister and Enclosure Faults), power supplies, canisters and temperatures parameters.
Sun and Oracle x86 server Monitoring: The connector MS_HW_SunILOMSNMP.hdf has been rewritten to minimize the number of OIDs polled and therefore prevent ILOM failure. Also, a more robust discovery and collection mechanism has been implemented to prevent false missing device alerts and "no collect value" error messages. Finally, Power Supply, Network Card and Other Device classes were added for Rack mounted servers.
IBM AIX Servers Monitoring: Hardware Sentry KM for PATROL 1.9.00 now supports logical network cards (and their associated physical cards).
NetApp Filers Monitoring: The product now provides more significant Physical Disk IDs for NetApp Filers. The MS_HW_NetApp.hdf  connector now uses the location ID (in the format 0c/0/11) in the console rather than the unique physical disk identifier (63431). The physical disk's device ID remains the unique identifier (63431).
Dell PowerEdge VRTX compatibility: The product now monitors Physical Disks, Disk Controllers, Logical Disks, Batteries and Storage System Temperatures in Dell PowerEdge M1000E chassis.

Miscellaneous

The MS_HW_IBMv7000.hdf connector has been deprecated and replaced by the MS_HW_IBMv7000SSH.hdf connector.
The following configuration variables have been removed:
/SENTRY/HARDWARE/reportFilename
/SENTRY/HARDWARE/reportFolder
/SENTRY/HARDWARE/reportHostList
/SENTRY/HARDWARE/reportScheduledDays
/SENTRY/HARDWARE/reportScheduledTime
/SENTRY/HARDWARE/reportScheduledToStart

and, the two following variables were added to match the new reporting features:

/SENTRY/HARDWARE/exportScheduling
/SENTRY/HARDWARE/scheduledReports        
A reinitialization is now automatically performed at the next discovery, if a connector file is updated.
VMWare ESX Memory Module Monitoring: The "Memory - General" instance is designed to activate if individual memory modules are not found. However if the discovery query of individual memory modules fails, it can be activated at one discovery, then go "missing" at the next. With this new version, the product has been modified so that it also checks that individual memory modules were not discovered in the previous discovery before enabling the global parameter, thus greatly reducing the chance of false-positive missing events on the memory - global parameter.
The identifiers for individual memory modules for some servers were not consistent. The identifier used for size and location was not always the same as the identifier for memory module status. It results in an incorrect number of modules being monitored and events being generated on the wrong module. The product has thus been modified to only use the memory module sensor's identifiers and location (size is no longer available).

Fixed Issues

The monitoring of Hitachi Disk Arrays failed due to the WBEM client (SEN_WBEMClient.jar).
NetApp Filers monitoring: Unallocated space is now calculated from multiple OIDs to overcome the 32bit OID limitation that could lead to report negative values.
AMS2000 (DF600F) LUNs were wrongly monitored as local disks on Solaris Systems. AMS2000 (DF600F) are now excluded since these disks are in fact LUNs from a Hitachi AMS2000 system.
IBM DS Storage System DS4000 monitoring: The SMcli commands have been updated to get an accurate calculation of logical disk size and a proper components When monitoring a Dell PowerEdge 1855/1955 Blade Chassis, the product did not recognize "Celcius" (with a capital C) that appears next to temperature sensors in recent chassis firmware.
Hardware Sentry KM for PATROL 1.9.00 no longer loads backup copies of connector files in the MS_HW_hdf directory or sub-directories therefore preventing the use of erroneous versions of connectors.
Metadatas were removed when the KM was reinitialized, potentially causing parameter integration issues in the BPPM console.
On HP Integrity servers running HP-UX, the status of the processors was not interpreted properly.
On IBM xSeries servers with version 6.3 or greater of the IBM Director Agent, alert thresholds were missing from some temperature sensors.
Ports with no description are no longer monitored in order to avoid erroneous missing alerts on Windows systems.
Failing connectors could create a deadlock during a discovery leading the product to no longer performing data collects. This issue was introduced in Hardware Sentry KM for PATROL 1.8.02.
Removing detected connectors for remote hosts can now be performed through the "Remove" KM Command.
The mechanism managing the discovery and collect concurrent processes has been optimized to make it more robust and avoid 'cond_wait()' error messages in the system output window.