Question:
What is CIM monitor?
Answer:
CIM (Common Information Model) or WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise Management) is a standardized way of monitoring health performance for computer hardware such as servers and storage. Kaseya introduced the CIM monitor in Kaseya Network Monitor 4.1 and it's been used by various customers to monitor their hardware platforms. This knowledgebase article explains how the CIM monitor works, and how you can utilize its functions within your KNM installation.
The CIM agent (often referred to as CIMOM) is the piece of software that KNM will query for its information, much like an SNMP agent. A CIM agent can be provided either through a special application on the hardware device itself, or through a service that is installed on a management station. Each CIM agent will need providers, sometimes referred to as drivers, to be able to give a correct response when queried.
The information that you can retrieve from a CIM agent is hierarchical and starts at the top with a namespace. See below for an example.
- Namespace (root/cimv2)
- Class (CIM_memory)
- Property (HealthState)
- Instance (OMC_CacheMemory;DeviceID='1041.02')
The example above would give you the health state of one memory module on an HP Proliant server. The CIM agent used in this case is VMware Hypervisor (ESXi) 5.1. As you may also see in the example, the standard namespaceroot/cimv2 and the standard class CIM_Memory are used but the CIM_Memory class points at another class,OMC_CacheMemory. Sometimes vendors have opted not to have pointers from the standard CIM namespaces and classes, and you would have to query an optional namespace.
To know what namespaces are available for your hardware, refer to the vendor documentation. The namespaceroot/cimv2 will almost always be available, but you may or may not get all information from there. Other common namespaces are the following:
- interop
- root/interop
- root/hpq
- root/eva
- root/hpmsa
- root/EMA
- root/ibm
- root/PG_InterOp
- root/lsissi11
- lsi/lsimr12
- root/emc
- root/lsissi
In general, check your vendor documentation or contact your vendor for the correct namespace used for the properties you wish to monitor.
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