HPE 3PAR Health sensor

Victor,

There are sensors available from a 3rd Party provider.

http://www.nms-guru.com/PRTG-Sensors-for-HPE-3Par.html

Let us know if you have any questions.

Hello Benjamin,

For using the HPE 3PAR sensors on NMS-GURU you have to pay. We were hoping Paessler could helping with this sensor.

No, this is the official option we support for HP 3PAR at this time. Check out Script World for any new additions that might support 3PAR in addition to NMS-GURU's solution.

While I understand that you guys "officially" support the NMS-GURU solution, its still an extra cost on top of PRTG and to be honest, I am not sure how I feel about having to acquire a license to use a sensor from a third party. HPE StoreServ/3PAR (StoreServ is the official HPE branding, it's still a 3PAR product) is a pretty big part of the market. You guys seem to support sensors for EMC even though they are marked as "BETA" products there is still some functionality there.

I've checked elsewhere on the forums for solutions and there seems to be a pretty reasonable demand for the sensor set.

Thanks for the time and reading my post!

I will pass your request along.

Thanks!

Benjamin Day
Paessler Support

Hey Benjamin,

I just wanted to touch base with you again. I've looked at the NMS-Guru solution and honestly, I don't think you guys should support or point people in this direction. There are a couple of big caveats to using the product and while I do not wish to discourage patronage to NMS-Guru because their product DOES work, as an enterprise level business the security practices exercised by their solution are sub optimal.

The product is based off a compiled executable and it requires PLINK in order to work. PRTG instantiates a .cmd file from Windows which calls the compiled exe. In order to setup a specific monitoring metric, you need to create a custom sensor and inside that custom sensor, you need to pass a username and a password in cleartext (in a parameters field), stored in PRTG that has root/admin level access to your StoreServ (3PAR, but StoreServ is the official product name) storage unit. Furthermore, if you have a more complex setup on your StoreServ some of the metrics come across wonkey.

If I had some time, I would attempt to make something myself however, that's a luxury I do not have at the moment. There are a couple ways to do this in an alternative fashion. HPE provides a StoreServ CLI tool that would be of use in this case (I don't have a download for it but the current version I have installed is 3.2.2 which is a more recent OS version 2018-ish) and they also have a WSAPI that hangs off the StoreServ systems (https://h20392.www2.hpe.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=HP3PAR_WS_API).

While I understand PRTG's/Paessler's hesitance towards taking on the responsibility of creating a sensor for HPE StoreServ/3PAR as a customer, the value add to a properly implemented StoreServ sensor would be immeasurable.

Thanks for your time.

Khue,

So we have a process in place for feature requests within our KB now.

Here is the 3Par KB link.

https://kb.paessler.com/en/topic/81144-sensors-for-hp-3par-storage-appliances

Just head over, and vote for that one. Voting helps these get attention, and potentially created by our developers.

Benjamin Day
Paessler Support

Dear Victor and Khue, just wanted to quickly respond to the concerns made on the 3PAR sensor pack.

- Firstly, the sensor was developed originally a year ago and since then it is being constantly improved and tested. We are committed to continue develop and improve. Now it has a new home with AutoMonX, a company that was set up to focus solely on developing PRTG extensions and products that enhance and enrich the PRTG functionality.

- We have handled the password and username encryption issue 6 months ago. And BTW the recommendation in our guide is to use the Read Only account vs. root

- Yes it involves running a compiled EXE, but that is the purpose of this sensor type. PTF sensors are also compiled code programs. Some of them are shipped with current PRTG releases.

- We have added auto discovery and monitoring automation, so adding 3PAR Sensors is very easy.

- It has been deployed world-wide with various enterprise customers having their monitoring needs solved in a cost effective and easy manner.

- We would love to get feedback on how we can improve, so please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected] Latest release of the sensor is 2.1.5 and can be downloaded from http://www.automonx.com/3par.html

Thank you

-

Hey ykorol,

If I recall correctly, your product uses an executable and ssh's into the InServ OS directly on the HPE StoreServ/3PAR SAN. I believe you connect to the management node in the cluster and then proceed to do show commands and from there you scrape the screen and import that into PRTG for the sensors.

One thing you should be cognizant about is that the InServ OS gets really touchy about constantly logging in and logging out of the SSH session. In the past, the InServ OS had a bug that could eventually cause the SSH session limit to be reached leaving you locked out of managing the OS. This impacts other facets of the StoreServ system like causing SAN based backups to fail and causing a problem with the StoreServ Service Processors from being able to collect and send back telemetry to HPE. I am not sure if this bug still exists, however it is something to be aware of.

I do not wish to discourage people from using your solution however, it's not an ideal solution for my environment due to method of access and how PRTG uses this method. I will probably have to sit down at some point and write my own sensor for this system eventually. If I were you and you were looking to push your product to a more enterprise level customer, I would look at using HPE's documented WSAPI system to get the metrics you need for your sensor rather than the ssh/screenscrape/parse method I think you were using when I first looked at your product.

Nice chatting with you and good luck with your products!