Watch4net APG 5/6: Setting up EMC Smarts Collector

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• VMware

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:


Watch4net APG 5 and APG 6: Setting up EMC Smarts Collector
How to set up EMC Smarts Collector using sm-discovery in Watch4Net APG 5 or APG 6

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - Watch4Net/M&R

Resolution

Steps
Backup the config file "sm-discovery.xml"

cp /opt/APG/Collecting/Smarts-Collector/Default/conf/sm-discovery.xml /opt/APG/Collecting/Smarts-Collector/Default/conf/sm-discovery.xml.ORIGINAL

Set the IP of your Smarts broker, username and password. APG will get all domains and will poll them automatically.

vi /opt/APG/Collecting/Smarts-Collector/Default/conf/sm-discovery.xml
<authentication>
    <broker>smart_server_IP:426</broker>
        <domains refresh-period="240">
        <default-username>admin</default-username>
        <default-password>changeme</default-password>
    </domains>
</authentication>

Backup the config file "collecting.xml" located in "/opt/APG/Collecting/Collector-Manager/Default/conf/"

cp /opt/APG/Collecting/Collector-Manager/Default/conf/collecting.xml /opt/APG/Collecting/Collector-Manager/Default/conf/collecting.xml.ORIGINAL

Edit your configuration file "collecting.xml" located in "/opt/APG/Collecting/Collector-Manager/Default/conf" and enable the collector for Ionix.

vi /opt/APG/Collecting/Collector-Manager/Default/conf/collecting.xml
<!-- This is the EMC Smarts collector. This collector automatically detects your domains and starts polling them immediately. -->
<collector enabled="true" name="SmDiscovery" next="PropertyTaggingFilter" type="Sm-Discovery" config="Smarts-Collector/Default/conf/sm-discovery.xml" />

Restart the collector manager

/opt/APG/bin/manage-modules.sh service restart collector-manager

Choose your polling period
You can choose your polling period in seconds (period element) according to your domain configuration and your needs. The collector will assign the string specified in the group element to generated raw values. This group should match one of your processing component configuration.

The refresh attribute controls how often the collector should set the refresh tag on the generated values. It can be either a time with a period (00:00/86400 will refresh properties each day at midnight) or a number of polling loop (360 will refresh properties every 360 polling loops). In both cases, properties will always be refresh on first polling loop, right after the collector start-up.

The send-on-refresh-only attribute controls the way the collecting component will send properties to the processing component. If set to true, it will send properties only when they are refreshed. Else, it will always send them.

The EMC2 Smarts InCharge Collector is an high performance, asynchronous process, which gather data from EMC2 Smarts InCharge in-memory repository very efficiently. The thread pool-size attribute lets you specify the number of concurrent pooling threads which will share a customizable number of connections to EMC2 Smarts InCharge domain (specified in dm-connection pool-size). Since the Collector is designed to be very fast, it can disturb EMC2 Smarts InCharge domain: that   s why there are two other parameters which control the polling rate. The dm-connection creation-grace-time is the minimum delay between consecutive connection to the EMC2 Smarts InCharge domain. The smooth-factor controls the actual polling rate. For example, if the polling period is 240 seconds and the smooth factor is 0.5, the Collector will try to pool the domain in 0.5 * 240 = 120 seconds. The dm-connection keep-connection attribute control whether we should keep domain connections after the polling process or not. It is usually more reliable to set it to false ensuring that we always have proper connectivity to the domain manager.

Finally, the most important configuration element of a EMC2 Smarts InCharge Collector is its domain descriptor file which defines what is interesting in a EMC2 Smarts InCharge domain.

[APG]/APG-Backend/conf

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE config SYSTEM "smarts.dtd"> <config>     <domain>INCHARGE-AM-PM</domain>     <broker>localhost:426</broker>     <username>admin</username>     <password>changeme</password>     <group>group</group>     <period>240</period>     <thread pool-size="3" />     <dm-connection pool-size="2" keep-connection="false" creation-grace-time="100" />     <indicators select="both">conf/pm.xml</indicators>     <properties refresh="00:00/86400" send-on-refresh-only="false" />     <smooth-factor>0.5</smooth-factor> </config>