MSI Issues after 9.2x upgrade of HP Operations Manager

Bear in mind if you use the MSI (Message Stream Interface) feature within HP Operations Manager HPOM) and have upgraded to v9.2 you could witness this problem.

If you have an ECS (event correlation circuit) that takes all messages from the MSI, and performs some action on some or all of the alerts, you could see behaviour as if the message was being copied to the MSI rather than being diverted to the MSI.  This can cause unexpected behavour such as duplicate messages, or active messages where you expected suppression (on further investigation you will probably see that duplication is causing a message to go via the MSI and get suppressed, but the copy is not sent to the MSI and is therefore not suppressed).

Solution:

Since OML 9.2x there are several MSI applications provided by HPOM itself - opcesf, opchcd, opcecm.  If you don't set their order in msiconf, all of them have the same priority if they are enabled.  Because of that all of them get the same messages at the same time and it appears as copy method would be used.

I checked again your msiconf file, and it looks like :
HealthCheck 1
esf 11

Please change it to become :
HealthCheck 1
opcesf 11
opcecm 21

After that, please restart opcecm :
# ovc -restart opcecm

You can then test to ensure the changes have been successful and the message behaviour is as expected.

Dave

Bottleneck Alert Probability 100% Annoying?

If you don't want to see the default (annoying!) Performance related alerts in HPOM, the ones similar to this...

Network Bottleneck Probability 100%

... then I hope you realise you can turn them off!

I saw one client who forget to do this, and due to the messages not being seen by any user profile or account, the quantity of these alerts was HUGE, and took a long time to get cleared-down manually, wasting time & effort.

I'll write more about these alerts in the future, and how they CAN be of use, but they need to be configured carefully and with planning, thought and care, as they are not intuitive or helpful out-of-the-box.

Here's how you check the current status of the performance agent:

/opt/perf/bin/agsysdb –l

And this is the command to turn off the sending of performance alerts to HPOM:

/opt/perf/bin/agsysdb –ovo off

Bear in mind that agent upgrades can turn this feature back on, so you might want to ensure your procedures include steps to turn it off again if required.

Alternatively, you could create a monitor to alert you if it gets enabled!  Now there's a thought...

Dave

Java GUI Issues in HPOM

I've seen issues in the past where Java GUI alerts in HP Operations Manager (HPOM) v9.x don't get owned or acknowledged when you trigger those actions.

If you reload the Java GUI console then the action you previously performed works, i.e. the alert is owned or acknowledged, but it's not being done automatically.

HP support came up with this fix - which seemed to work:

# /opt/OV/bin/ovc -stop SERVER
# rm -rf /var/opt/OV/share/tmp/OpC/mgmt_sv/WAP*
# rm -rf /var/opt/OV/share/tmp/OpC/mgmt_sv/WWW*
# rm -rf /var/opt/OV/share/tmp/OpC/ui/*
# /opt/OV/bin/ovc -start

I have also seen the Java GUI hang on the "Loading Messages" screen, and we think this was due to different versions of the Java GUI being used, so I strongly recommend if you see this issue keep an eye on the versions being used (use the listguis command) and try to align all users to the latest version.

Dave

Welcome

Hi,

Welcome to my new blog - this is where I am going to share comments, experience, tips and anything else I think of that might be of use to you, in and around the area of IT infrastructure monitoring.

I am very experienced in using HP Operations Manager (HPOM) software (formerly known as HP OpenView), but will try and also make sure these posts are of use to anyone working in the area of IT monitoring systems in general, as many of the issues, problems and goals remain the same, regardless of the tools used.

Thanks,
Dave