UCS FI + UCSM + Blade chassis monitoring options

[cniculescu]

Hello,

I have several FIs and blade chassis, and I'm trying to get a global monitoring view. As a monitoring solution, I'm using Solarwinds.

The solution I found is to have the FIs added in monitoring as simple Nexus switches with SNMP, Nexus CLI access and no UCSM credentials. The UCSM VIP was added as ICMP and UCSM credentials. This way, I get some chassis and blade information.

Then I wanted to poke more into the blade, but as I have a mix of bare-metal and Vmware on the blades I thought to poke into the CIMC with SNMP or CLI to grab all hardware parts.

Each OS that runs will be added on his own as a server monitoring option, but here is more application stuff.

A couple of questions/issues:

- should UCSM VIP respond to SNMP? i can't make it to.

- can't find how to make CIMC IP respond to SNMP or CLI, only web kvm

is there a better overall way to monitor using SNMP/SSH/API?

i have multiple version but one is: FIs UCS-FI-6332-16UP, Cisco UCS Manager 4.2(2a) , chassis UCSB-5108-AC2 and blade UCSB-B200-M6. All of them are bundles also in UCS Central.

Any help, pointers, links are welcomed.

Regards,

Ciprian

[Kirk J]

Greetings.

When UCS rack servers are integrated with UCSM, a portion of the management services change, including SNMP.

Stand alone servers will have their own SNMP OID range.  Once integrated, the overall UCSM manager (different SNMP OID range) is used (individual CIMCs no longer respond to SNMP), and will house ALL the connected servers using the UCSM VIP's SNMP OID range.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/ucs-manager/GUI-User-Guides/System-Monitoring/4-2/b-UCSM-GUI-System-Monitoring-Guide-4-2/b_UCSM_GUI_System_Monitoring_Guide_chapter_01000.html

Solar Winds by default will treat the UCSM VIP (and FI node IPs) as nxos type switch, but they need to have additional packaged blocks of OIDs for the various blade and rack server objects.

See https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/mib/b-series/b_UCS_MIBRef/b_UCS_MIBRef_chapter_0100.html#reference_ACB027A5FD474F5A8A4A90D5A5362CB4 for some sample OID ranges.

As to VIP not responding to SNMP walks, you may want to open a TAC case to investigate if UCSM shows the snmp requests come in.  What ver of SNMP have you configured? (i.e. ver 2, ver 3, etc)

Kirk...

[cniculescu]

Hello,

Thank you for the response.

i am using SNMP version 2.

Do the CIMC still need to be activated by a server profile to pass the information to the managing UCSM or is not needed?

Another question, in one of the links from you, it says that the UCSM Management model is exposed in both XML over HTTP and SNMP to help SNMP based monitoring. Then if in SolarWinds i use the "UCS Credential over HTTP", i don't need anymore to poll over SNMP. In theory

i will open a TAC for debugging the VIP SNMP issue.

Regards,

Ciprian

[mikehughes72]

Hello,

I'm having a similar issue using PRTG to monitor the UCS. 

Recently swapped out 6292 FI's for 6454 FI's and now we cannot use SNMP to the Primary node or the VIP only the subordinate.

Using ver2 and all same firmware - 4.1.3e - in UCS, before the HW swap we could connect to all the IPs, I have a support case open but no answers yet.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Regards

Mike