Using N‑central for Server Hardware Monitoring

While it is fair to say that in recent years we’ve seen a shift to servers being deployed in the cloud through Microsoft Azure or AWS, I’m sure if you’re reading this today you still have a large percentage of physical servers under your management, including Hyper-V and ESXi hosts. N‑central’s ESXi monitoring should automatically detect and monitor the hardware in these boxes, but what about the rest? In this blog we’re going to look at how N‑able N‑central can monitor these physical servers, so you can address detected issues before they cause the server to fail.

To monitor the hardware on these servers, you’ll first need to prepare them by taking these steps:

1. Ensure that SNMP Services are added and running on each server, and note the community strings in use. N‑central only requires a string with read-only privileges, so you can add a string as “public” (or whatever you prefer) as long as you add the SNMP string to your discovery job.
2. Ensure that you select the Accept SNMP packets from any host option on the Security tab for SNMP Service Properties.
3. Depending on your servers’ manufacturer, you’ll need to install the following software packages on the appropriate servers and to verify that the software is working correctly:

• • Dell: OpenManage Agent
  • HP: Systems Insight Manager Agent
  • IBM: ServerRAID for RAID-level monitoring
  • IBM: Director Platform Agent for hardware-level monitoring
  • Intel: System Management Software

Once you’ve prepared your servers, the next steps will depend on whether these are new devices being imported into N‑central or if they already exist in your N‑central instance.

New devices

If they’re new devices and you have taken the steps outlined above to prepare them, then the default monitoring templates should be applied for the relevant manufacturers by the default server. You should use the Windows rule except with HP servers, where I recommend creating a separate rule with a custom filter that targets physical HP servers to apply the HP servers’ monitoring template.

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Existing devices

If the devices were already imported into N‑central but you hadn’t taken the three steps above to prepare them for hardware monitoring, you’ll need to complete the steps and then ensure SNMP monitoring is enabled for each of these servers. This can be done through bulk edit from the All Devices screen by first selecting the relevant servers, then clicking on Edit, scrolling down to Monitoring Options and checking the box to “Use SNMP.” Finally, you need to ensure the community string matches what you configured on the servers.

Alternatively, you can enable SNMP on a device-by-device basis by clicking on Settings > Monitoring Options and then checking the box to “Use SNMP.” Again, ensure that the community string matches what you configured on the servers.

Once you’ve enabled SNMP on these devices, you’ll need to run a discovery job to update the devices. The hardware monitoring should be automatically applied for all manufacturers, with the exception of HP. If you haven’t configured it already, I recommend creating a separate rule with a custom filter that targets physical HP servers to apply the HP servers’ monitoring template.

Building your “at a glance” dashboards 

With the monitoring now applied to your physical servers, you can build dashboards to get an “at a glance” view of these devices. I recommend creating manufacturer-specific dashboards, as the monitoring services for these physical servers are specific to each manufacturer.

By default, your N‑central server should also have a predefined Notification Profile for server hardware issues. Review this profile to ensure the relevant people or teams are notified in the event that a failure is detected.

To learn more about creating filters and dashboards for server hardware monitoring, check out this resource.

If you haven’t been using N‑central to monitor your physical servers up to this point, I hope this blog will inspire you to do so. If you have questions, join me on the N‑central office hours at dev.n-able.com/events, or check out the Boot Camp: Customer On-boarding N‑central.

Paul Kelly is the Head Nerd at N‑able. You can follow him on Twitter at @HeadNerdPaul, LinkedIn and Reddit at u/Paul _Kelly