Known issues and limitations of the Hardware Management Pack, V2.0

The following issues and limitations are related to the Hardware Management Pack.

1. Systems are not correctly classified until long after their discovery

Discovery operations on some systems can take a relatively long time. While the discovery is occurring, the system might be incorrectly classified at first, but corrected after a period of time. When this happens, the event log contains script timed out events for the Operations Manager on the managed system, and perhaps for Active Alerts on the Operations Manager Server.

Workaround: You can perform a manual refresh to see the discovered components more quickly.

2. Old systems that are categorized as "Unclassified" might support discovery, health monitoring, and alerting

An older system might be categorized as an unclassified IBM® system, although it is recognized as an IBM system. Component discovery, health monitoring, and alerting might be active, so long as IBM Director Agent supports the discovery, monitoring, and alerting.

This is normal behavior for the Hardware Management Pack without a workaround.

3. Not all components in every system are discoverable, and not all hardware events are reportable events on every system

Component discovery and health monitoring depend on hardware capability, firmware support, and management software support. Some systems might have more than one physical power supply, for example, but perhaps not all of the power supplies are instrumented or manageable.

Hardware health events are specific to hardware platforms. Not all hardware events are supported as reportable events on all hardware platforms.

This is normal behavior for the Hardware Management Pack.

Workaround: To achieve full health monitoring and management coverage of your entire hardware system, upgrade to a newer system that is equipped with a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) service processor, or that is equipped with RSA-II.

4. Older management controllers might not be discoverable

Older versions of service processors cannot be discovered. These older service processors include the ASM PCI Adapter, the ASM processor, and ISMP, all of which are not discoverable. However, components that these older service processors manage might be discovered and monitored if IBM Director Agent supports their discovery and monitoring.

This is normal behavior for the Hardware Management Pack.

Workaround: To achieve full health monitoring and management coverage of your entire hardware system, upgrade to a newer system that is equipped with a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) service processor, or that is equipped with RSA-II.

5. The IBM Director event simulation tool is not supported

The IBM Hardware Management Pack does not support tools like winevent that do generate IBM Director events, but that do not fully prescribe specific target instances. Such simulated events are displayed in the Operations Manager Console event views, but no alerts are raised and no health state changes occur.

This is normal behavior for the Hardware Management Pack without a workaround.

6. You must reset the health of some components manually for some events

The IBM Hardware Management Pack can automatically reset the health status of some components when there is specific enough information to reset the health status of the component. Other component events are too generic to establish a baseline for resetting the health. In these cases, you must reset the status manually.

You must manually reset the normal health state of components that recover from the following problems:
  • Security health problems
  • Storage health problems
  • Nonspecific device problems, such as a generic processor error
  • Platform-specific extended events, such as a processor temperature that is too hot, without an out-of-processor-chip temperature sensor

This is normal behavior for the Hardware Management Pack without a workaround.

7. Estimated lag time for discovery

After the Discovery Wizard indicates that the discovery task has completed successfully, it might take from two or more minutes for an IBM system to show up in the “Windows Computer on IBM System x and BladeCenter x86 Blade Systems” view. The time for all hardware components to be discovered and to start indicating their health state might take five minutes or longer.

Latency is subject to a variety of directly related influences:
  • The number of managed systems in the discovery task
  • The performance of the Operations Manager database
  • The amount and speed of network traffic

See also the known Microsoft Operations Manager issue, "4. Up to a three-or-four-minute-lag time after discovery and adding a managed system" in Known issues and limitations of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007.

This is normal behavior for the IBM Hardware Management Pack without a workaround.

8. Using the Operations Manager Web Console prevents knowledge pages from being displayed

If you are using the Operations Manager Web Console to view a browser-based version of the Monitoring pane of the Operations Manager Console, the IBM knowledge pages cannot be displayed. Therefore, the IBM knowledge pages are not available.

Workaround: Use the Operations Manager 2007 Console to manage the environment and view all IBM knowledge pages.

This is a known issue in IBM Hardware Management Pack, Version 2.0.0.

Parent topic: Known limitations