Hardware monitors provide visibility into the hardware components used in your network devices. Hardware components generate physically measurable metrics like temperature, voltage, or speed.
Because of this, hardware monitors need specific sensors within the devices to provide them with the necessary metrics, which can be viewed and analyzed in real time.
ManageEngine OpManager is an advanced hardware monitor software for network devices and servers.
It combines metrics with timely alerts, graphs, and dials, and offers remote troubleshooting features, so you can track hardware performance and fix issues proactively.
OpManager’s Hardware Monitoring Capabilities
Get real-time updates on hardware components
OpManager monitors the hardware components of network devices like routers, switches, firewalls, and printers. It can also pull metrics from servers and storage devices.
When it comes to virtual devices, OpManager can monitor the hardware components of host and guest devices. The hardware metrics monitored by OpManager include:
Temperature: Devices generate heat as they operate. If the cooling systems aren’t working properly, temperatures will increase and jeopardize the performance of your devices.
Temperature rise could also be indicative of processes or services over-utilizing system resources. OpManager updates the CPU temperature at regular intervals to provide you with real-time visibility into system performance.
Fan speed: Another way to keep track of system temperature is to monitor fan speed. Proper airflow keeps your hardware components cool and ventilated.
OpManager uses sensors to monitor fan speed and keeps you updated about their performance. When cooling systems are down, time is of utmost importance, as continued high temperatures could permanently damage your installation.
Power supply: OpManager lets you monitor the power supplied to different hardware components. This includes input voltage, power state of the device, and power supply unit (PSU) redundancies. Power supply monitoring helps you track surges, outages, and energy consumption.
Processor clock speed: Processor clock speed is the number of cycles completed by the CPU every second. Generally, higher processor speeds indicate better performance.
OpManager’s processor clock speed sensor measures processor speeds at billions of cycles per second to track CPU utilization and processor performance.
Battery: OpManager can monitor the status and charge of hardware batteries, which require constant monitoring to prevent degradation.
Battery monitoring is particularly useful for devices like uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and storage devices, which can’t afford any downtime. Battery monitoring is also useful for battery backup devices.
Monitor hardware performance
Having deeper visibility into hardware components like CPU, memory, and disk arrays can help you detect impending issues proactively.
Consider a server: if CPU utilization is higher than usual, it might be indicative of some unwanted process overutilizing the server’s resources. Knowing this, you can terminate the process before it snowballs into a larger issue.
Similarly, there are many other metrics that OpManager can monitor to provide you with better insights into device performance, including memory utilization, free memory, disk utilization, disk I/O reads and writes, disk bytes, process count, process queue, and more.
OpManager has advanced performance monitors specific to the device type, vendor, and the software used.
For instance, if you have an IBM mail server running on Linux, you can associate IBM monitors, monitors specific to the mail server, and Linux monitors. This provides a high degree of accuracy for your monitoring.
Complement hardware monitoring with advanced alerts
Alerts are essential to monitor and manage your network devices. If a network monitor finds any discrepancies, it will alert you promptly with the nature and severity of the issue and provide critical insights.
You can configure alert severity with OpManager’s multi-level thresholds. There are three levels of severity: attention, trouble, and critical.
Alerts also come with descriptions and insights that enable you to take immediate action, and the alarm escalation feature let’s you push unacknowledged alerts up the chain of command.
You can’t act upon alerts if you don’t receive them. OpManager can send notifications via multiple channels like SMS, e mail, Slack, and webhook. OpManager also has an adaptive thresholds feature that eliminates alert floods and false positives by optimizing threshold settings.
Visualize hardware metrics for better insights
Monitoring data can be visualized with graphs and dials to better understand their status and history. OpManager can generate visual representations for different device types and their hardware components.
This includes temperature, fan speed, processor queue, clock speed, disk space, memory, utilization metrics, and more. You can configure data collection periods, forecast values, as well as export them into PDF or Excel formats.
OpManager has other visualization tools like dials, heat maps, bar diagrams, topology maps, server rack views, and datacenter floor views.
Generate hardware health reports
Hardware health reports summarize the performance of your hardware components over a selected period. Health reports include minimum, maximum, and average values of hardware metrics as well as graphs.
Hardware health reports help you to gauge the performance of these devices and plan for more efficient utilization in the future. You can also filter sensor input and export graphs into PDF or Excel formats.
Monitor multiple hardware vendors out of the box
Hardware monitoring shouldn’t be limited by the vendors a monitoring tool supports. OpManager supports an extensive list of hardware vendors like Dell, HP, Juniper, Cisco, IBM, and more.
You can create device templates with information such as vendor, device type, category, and system OID, and associate monitors to those templates.
OpManager will apply templates to discovered devices and start monitoring them right away. OpManager comes with over 10,000 device templates from over 450 vendors, with an option to add custom templates.
Speed up hardware issue resolution
The speed with which hardware issues can be resolved often makes the difference between prolonged outages and continued uptime.
With OpManager, you can automate troubleshooting by creating workflows. Workflows are triggered in response to an action like an alarm or event and can automate actions like running checks, terminating processes, clearing alarms, or running scripts.
OpManager also has a root cause analysis feature that speeds up fault identification by aiding in device data correlation.
Keep tabs on hardware metrics from distributed sites
Modern IT operations are spread over different locations, including datacenters and cloud storage solutions.
OpManager for enterprises has a central-probe architecture, wherein a central server can be configured to pull metrics from probe servers installed across multiple sites.
This way, you can track the hardware performance of your off-site devices, troubleshoot them remotely, and be alerted of any impending issues.
OpManager offers specialized hardware monitoring features along with its comprehensive network monitoring features. With a single solution, you can monitor hardware performance, availability, network devices, servers, storage devices, and virtual devices.
Track them all with OpManager’s alerts, reports, and graphing tools, and use its troubleshooting tools to keep them in peak operating condition.
OpManager is the one stop solution for all your hardware and network monitoring needs. Download OpManager or try their free, 30-day trial to see for yourself.
