Compaq Adds Monitoring Agents to Server Line - Company Business and Marketing

Few people would buy a car that lacked an oil gauge or thermometer, but plenty of administrators purchase servers that give little insight into the machine's status. Compaq is trying to reverse this habit by including its availability agents within each of its ProLiant servers.

"It's increasingly difficult to manage growing services with constrained resources," says Patti Dosset, product manager at Compaq. The availability agents allow administrators to view system information via a Web page, simplifying the management of remote or large numbers of servers.

The availability agents give information in four basic areas: disk utilization, free memory, CPU utilization, and connectivity. The tools allow administrators to see if servers are functioning normally and have the resources to continue to function. "An IT administrator faces all of these issues on Microsoft Windows servers," Dosset says.

The agents allow administrators to customize and cut the data shown on the Web page. For example, the storage page allows administrators to drill down and monitor the size of individual folders on a disk. The memory page enables administrators to allocate memory on a server for certain tasks. The pages give administrators a certain degree of flexibility in monitoring machines.

The agents also have threshold-based monitoring features that alert administrators to when a disk is full or a server is out of memory. SNMP traps are enabled in the software for advanced network management.

All of the agents fit into Compaq's InsightManager XE network management framework. "You can view them across the network for a consolidated picture," Dossett explains. Shops interested in moving to an all Compaq network management system can purchase agents for monitoring existing devices.

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