Dell Systems

Introduction

I'm developing an HQ plugin to monitor the hardware status of our Dell systems, using Dell's OpenManage and SNMP.
An initial version of the plugin is attached to this page, as well as the latest MIBs from Dell (see also: Links)

The plugin does not do very much yet. Currently, the plugin appears in the Hyperic UI as a server type resource, named "Dell Hardware", and it automatically discovers the available power supplies, which appear as "Power Supply" service type resources within the parent server resource. For each detected power supply, it measures their individual output watts.

So far, I have only tested the plugin with the plugin installed on the host that is being monitored (and where the HQ Agent is running), so the plugin sends the SNMP queries to localhost.

Prerequisites

The plugin requires that OpenManage is running (and working), with SNMP enabled.
On Linux, you can check if SNMP is enabled using this command:

Get OpenManage SNMP status

[root@host root]# /etc/init.d/dataeng getsnmpstatus
Data Engine SNMP enabled

If not enabled, you can enable SNMP with these commands

Enable OpenManage SNMP

[root@host root]# /etc/init.d/dataeng enablesnmp
Data Engine SNMP enabled

Then restart snmpd and the OpenManage Data Engine:

Restart snmpd and dataeng

[root@host root]# /etc/init.d/snmpd restart
Stopping snmpd:                                            [  OK  ]
Starting snmpd:                                            [  OK  ]
[root@host root]# /etc/init.d/dataeng restart
Stopping Systems Management Data Engine:
Stopping dsm_sa_snmp32d:                                   [  OK  ]
Stopping dsm_sa_eventmgr32d:                               [  OK  ]
Stopping dsm_sa_datamgr32d:                                [  OK  ]
Starting Systems Management Data Engine:
Starting dsm_sa_datamgr32d:                                [  OK  ]
Starting dsm_sa_eventmgr32d:                               [  OK  ]
Starting dsm_sa_snmp32d:                                   [  OK  ]

You can check if the OpenManage SNMP values are accessible by sending an SNMP get request.
Make sure the Dell MIB files are used by the snmp commands. I usually put them in /usr/share/snmp/mibs and
put the option "mibs ALL" in the SNMP configuration file (/etc/snmp/snmp.conf).

Checking if OpenManage SNMP is working

[root@host root]# snmpget -Os -v2c -c public localhost systemManagementSoftwareDescriptionName.0
systemManagementSoftwareDescriptionName.0 = STRING: "Management software for Dell systems."

Regards,
Leander Koornneef