Understanding the process for monitoring server health with Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

Device information can be visible within the Network Management Console (NMC) without specifying a Component Object Model (COM) component. You need to install the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) driver (supplied by the device manufacturer). Then, using ConfigWMIMonitor, identify the namespace, class, and fields that the WMI driver is exposing. This process will result in the NMC showing a new node for this device class and rows within the NMC for each device found therein.

For example, you could install the WMI drivers supplied by IBM (the manufacturer of your servers) that might expose some of the motherboard BIOS information to WMI clients. This information could include such things as fan speed and cpu temperature. The WMI Monitor is therefore a WMI client, reading the information on a periodic basis (as configured) from the device driver. The WMI Monitor then publishes this information to all of the NMC clients.

Once you've installed the WMI drivers supplied by the manufacturer, other clients (for example, Tivoli) can use this information as well. The WMI is a standard (like Simple Network Management Protocol [SNMP]) to manage and retrieve information about your network. However, it is designed to provide "richer" information about the computers and servers on your network than SNMP is expected to deliver.

For more information on WMI drivers, refer to the WMI manufacturer's website, and search for the term WMI associated with your server ID/class.

The ConfigWMIMonitor will let you configure whether or not you want to have the icon(s) (in NMC) change colour (green/yellow/red), or for generating adminPager/Alarm/Event announcements when something happens to the device.

Essentially, because each class exposes different fields, and each field may have different possible values, configuration for each field may be necessary.

For example, monitoring of the INTEL Network Interface Controller (NIC) failures. The INTEL NIC exposes through the INTEL supplied WMI drivers (the DeviceID field, the status field). The status field can have different values (for example, status = OK). Thus you can configure this field to monitor the INTEL NIC base on the values of this field.

By contrast, if we used a 3COM NIC, the WMI driver may expose different fields (for example, state) with different values (for example, state = VALID).