SCOM: SP1 Edition of the Cisco Management Pack , v1.0.2.6

I have completed the first version of the Cisco Management Pack for SP1 compatibility.  The monitoring in the management pack is identical to the R2 version of the MP, described most recently here.      Due to the dependence on the WMI SNMP provider for object discovery, there are inevitably some scalability limitations intrinsic to the SP1 edition of this MP, but I haven’t done enough full-scale testing to ascertain those limitations as of yet.   Additionally, deployment of this management pack requires some additional steps.   These steps are detailed below (taken from the MP documentation):

Prerequisites

This management pack utilizes the WMI SNMP provider to perform discovery of SNMP objects.  In order to use this management pack, the following steps must be completed on each server that will function as a proxy agent for SNMP-monitored Cisco devices.

Install the SNMP protocol and WMI SNMP provider

• To install these components, access Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel, and select Add/Remove Windows Components.  Under Management and Monitoring select: Simple Network Management Protocol and WMI SNMP Provider

The following MIBs must be exported to MOF files with smi2smir.exe and imported with MOFComp.exe:  CISCO-ENVMON-MIB and CISCO-MEMORY-POOL-MIB.  

• The MIBs and a batch file to perform these steps can be found in the /Setup directory included with this MP distribution.   Run the RegCiscoMibs.cmd file and check the output log: register.log to confirm that the mibs were successfully compiled and imported.

Recommended Proxy Agent Configuration

If WMI receives too many requests in a short time, it may suspend processing of requests for a period of time.   This can impact the ability of this management pack to discover Cisco SNMP objects in a timely fashion (WMI SNMP is only used by this MP for discovery, and not object monitoring).   In order to minimize the chances of this situation occurring, the object discoveries in this MP should not be scheduled too aggressively.   Additionally, it is recommended that if a large number of Cisco SNMP devices are to be monitored, they should be distributed across multiple proxy agents for load-balancing of the WMI SNMP requests. 

It is highly recommended that all agents that will function as proxy agents for SNMP devices have the Windows Script Host version 5.7 installed.  Version 5.7 is far more efficient than previous versions and reduces the resource utilization by the cscript.exe process dramatically.

It is also highly recommended that all agents that will function as proxy agents for SNMP devices have the hotfix: KB96163 applied.  This hotfix resolves instability with SNMP monitoring in Operations Manager 2007 SP1. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/961363

I’m interested to hear how this SP1 edition of the Cisco Management Pack functions in different environments, so any feedback is most certainl welcome.  I will continue to post updates to this site so be sure to check back regularly.   For more information about the scripts utilized in discoveries in this edition of the MP, this post should sum it up.

SCOM: Updates to the Cisco Management Pack (R2) v1.0.2.6

I’m hoping to finish up the SP1 version of the Cisco Management Pack pretty soon, but I’ve modified the R2 version to include several new changes.  The current version: 1.0.2.6 can be downloaded here. 

The changes in this version are:

• Added three new containment classes:  Cisco Device Chassis, Cisco Device System Components, and Cisco Device Interfaces.   These classes contain monitored objects to add an additional level of hierarchical organization.
• Added discovery of the IFAlias property for Interfaces
• Added discovery of the Hostname (OLD-CISCO-MIB) and Chassis description for the Cisco Device class.
• Updated the properties displayed by default in the Device and Interface views
• Added a rule to clean up unused XML temporary files once a day.   Several of the monitors utilize temporary XML files written to the %TEMP% path.  In the previous version, old files would be left on the file system if a previously monitored object was removed.  This rule will remove those temporary files.
• Modified discovery intervals for some objects for more balanced timing.
• Added four new monitors for switches that implement the CISCO-STACK-MIB.  The monitors are targeted at the Cisco Device Chassis class and include
  • Fan Alarm
  • Temperature Alarm
  • Minor Alarm
  • Major Alarm

With the new containment classes, the diagram view looks a lot better: