OS Administrator/user/service account password changes and their impact on UIM/Nimsoft

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)
• CA Unified Infrastructure Management SaaS (Nimsoft / UIM)
• Unified Infrastructure Management for Mainframe

Issue/Introduction

According to the Microsoft compliance standard, sometimes we need to change the administrator/user accounts password of the Windows server.

In which case, or under what circumstances will account and/or password changes impact Nimsoft monitoring?

1) Nimsoft server local administrator user

2) Nimsoft server domain administrator user

3) WMI account used for discovery

Environment

UIM: 20.3 or higher

OS: any Windows OS version

Cause

- password changes related to UIM

Resolution

1. UIM/Nimsoft server local administrator user, or an Active Directory (AD) service account

Robot operations - if the robot is running as System it should be ok, if its running as a service account that is the local admin account, then the Robot controller properties would need to be updated. Normally, the only robots that would be using a 'service account' would be the Primary/HA hub, cabi, OC/UMP robot, as well as any other database probe profiles in sqlserver, oracle, etc., since they need access to the database, otherwise we normally see robots are configured to run as the 'Local System' account.

2. UIM/Nimsoft server domain administrator user

A change to this account would only affect any probes that were specifically configured to use the account such as ntperf, perfmon, rsp, ntevl, processes, ADE, etc. but it depends on what probes you have deployed and/or configured to use a Windows domain account.

3. WMI account used for UIM discovery

A Windows WMI account/password in general would need to be changed in ANY probe that uses WMI to fetch data, e.g., rsp, discovery_server, discovery_agent.

4. data_engine

Also if Windows NT Integrated security (Windows Auth) is being used for the data_engine that account-password needs to be updated as well.

5. Discovery

In general, account password changes will adversely affect the discovered servers/devices, depending on access and how they are being discovered, e.g., if they are discovered using the system user and password. For Discovery, WMI and/or Linux/Unix credentials are required to run discovery and deploy robots via the Automated Deployment Engine (ADE) for mass deployments or robots.

      6. Gateway probes

          Check any/all gateway probes to see if a service account is being used to see whether or not it will be affected, e.g., spectrumgtw, sdgtw, etc.