HP Insight Management Agents architecture for Windows servers

3
Introduction
This technology brief is an overview of the HP Insight Management Agents for HP ProLiant servers
running the Windows server operating system. Our goal is to provide an architectural overview of
the entire set of client-side software components on ProLiant servers that provide integrated
manageability using the HP Systems Insight Management solution. To get the most from this paper,
you should already be familiar with HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) in managed server
environments.
A first look at the Insight Management Agents architecture
HP Insight Management Agents provide a robust solution for monitoring and managing ProLiant
servers using HP Systems Insight Manager. To provide this functionality, which extends beyond that
of simple SNMP-based management, the Insight Management Agents architecture requires the
installation of a set of software components on each managed server. Although we commonly refer
to them as the Insight Management Agents, you should actually think of these as three different
groups of software components, each performing a core function in the Insight Manager
architecture.
The first group consists of the Insight agents and the individual device drivers. There are four
different agents in the Insight architecture for Windows–based servers. As a group, they collect all of
the management information about the server, usually through the various device drivers. This
information is reported and displayed in the Systems Insight Manager console and the System
Management Homepage. This includes information about the server’s health, key operating system
statistics, and information about the server hardware. The Insight agents and the HP drivers that
support them are available through the HP Service Pack for ProLiant at
http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/service_packs/en/index.html.
The SNMP Services are the second component of the architecture. They include the Microsoft SNMP
Agent Service that provides the basic set of SNMP services between the managed server and HP
SIM.
The third component group is the System Management Homepage (SMH) framework. In addition to
acting as a web server to deliver detailed information about the managed server as part of the SIM
console, it also implements the core functionality that makes unique SIM features such as single
sign-on and replicate agents settings possible.
Figure 1 shows an overview of the Insight Management Agents architecture and the basic
interoperation of the component groups. The sections that follow describe the roles of each of the
components in the Insight Management architecture and provide more details about the
architecture.