Monitor hardware health in SAM

You can use SAM to monitor the health of Cisco UCS, Nutanix, Dell, HP, HPE ProLiant, and IBM hardware details such as temperature, fan speed, power supply, CPU, memory, and more. SAM provides instant visibility of hardware status (for example Up or Down); it can also calculate baseline data that can be used to configure hardware health thresholds.

This section focuses on Dell, HP, HPE ProLiant, and IBM devices. See the SolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide to learn how to:

• Monitor Cisco UCS Devices. The first step is adding the parent UCS controller as an SolarWinds Platform node.
• Monitor hardware health for Nutanix clusters. After adding Hyper-V or VMware nodes for monitoring, add the parent Nutanix cluster and provide Controller VM (CVM) credentials.
  

  UCS and Nutanix hardware health monitoring does not currently support the SolarWinds Platform Remote Collector feature.

To start monitoring hardware health for Dell, HP, HPE ProLiant, and IBM devices:

1. Review the following topics:
   • Monitor hardware health (SolarWinds Platform products Administrator Guide)
   • Hardware health monitoring requirements for SAM
2. Download, install, and configure agent software from third-party vendors so SAM can gather details that are not available natively from server operating systems. Click here for details.
   
3. Run Discovery to detect third-party agent software on nodes, deploy agents that act as hardware health sensors, and automatically enable hardware health monitoring across multiple nodes. When Discovery enables hardware health monitoring for eligible devices, Asset Inventory data collection is also enabled for those nodes.
   

   Although Hardware Health and Asset Inventory can both be enabled automatically during Discovery, they can poll independently. For example, you can collect Asset Inventory data from a node once a day, and collect hardware health every 10 minutes. 

Note the following details about hardware health monitoring in SAM:

• In addition to using Discovery, you can enable monitoring in the Add Node Wizard or Node Details views.
  
• Certificate errors found during polling are ignored by default, but you can change that setting.
• For tips on monitoring HPE Proliant Gen10 servers, see this THWACK post.
• If you encounter issues, see Troubleshoot hardware health monitoring in SAM.
• Data gathered varies by manufacturer and polling method. See Difference in hardware health by manufacturer and polling method for servers in the Success Center for details.

Related topics in the SolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide include:

• Change the MIB used for polling hardware health statistics
• Edit hardware health thresholds
• Enable, disable, or adjust hardware health sensors
• Troubleshoot hardware issues in the SolarWinds Platform

Hardware health monitoring is a database-intensive feature. Heavy usage can impact database performance and increase the size of the SolarWinds Platform database. To improve performance, consider how often you need to poll statistics, and how long data is archived. See Update polling settings in the SolarWinds Platform.