HP Insight Remote Support

I used to love the fact that with my old Netapp FAS2040 that I’d get a phone call about replacing a failed drive almost before I received the alert about the drive in the first place.  Phone home seemed genius to me and as it turns out, Hewlett Packard has this capability for their equipment.

Full disclosure: As many of you know, I currently work for an HP Partner so my advice may be a bit biased.  I can tell you that I wouldn’t put a product on this site which I didn’t like so please don’t think that I’m just trying to push HP products.  You may see more HP related articles from me, only because I encounter them more frequently than others.

The HP Phone home product is called “HP Insight Remote Support” and is free for download.  This product really doesn’t do a whole lot in your environment, but does exactly what you’d expect it to do.  It scans your environment, monitors your equipment for errors and uploads that data to HP.  All of your serial numbers are uploaded so that HP can determine if the equipment is under contract or warranty and could automatically create a ticket for you if you wish.

The install is very straight forward; just download the product from https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=REMOTESUPPORT and it’s a typical next, next finish install.  Once the install is finished it will create a shortcut on your desktop to launch the tool in a browser menu.

Log in with a user that has Admin rights on the server.  This could be a domain account as long as it’s an admin on this particular machine.

The first time you log in, you can go through the wizards, but you can always skip these and do it manually if you’d rather.

Add some credentials that will be used to log into the equipment.  You’ll notice that you have options for SANiQ (lefthand OS), SNMP, Telnet, http(s), Command view etc.  Make sure to add credentials for iLO Remote Insight Board Command Language (RIBCL).  These are the credentials used to log into iLO which are important to get the serial numbers and health of your systems.  More than one credential could be used for these and you can specify an order to which you’d like to have them tried during the discovery process.

The next step is to determine what machines to scan.  You can use Active Directory or IP Addresses.

Wait for the discovery process to finish finding your equipment.

The second wizard will be to setup the host.  This includes things like making sure you have connectivity to HP’s site.

The next screen will want to know contact information.  This will be used for ticketing and communication in the event of a hardware failure.  You will also be asked to setup a site.  You can have more than one site with different addresses.  The addresses obviously are used for shipping information.

Next you can decide to register your host with HP, and whether or not you want to be able to view your data on HP’s “Insight Online” portal.

An optional step is to add HP Partners to the portal, so in the event that warranties etc. are about to expire, the channel partners can get involved.  If you’d rather, you can ignore this and leave only HP in the loop.

When you’re finished, you’ll be able to see the list of devices and their status.  The Gen8 servers are being monitored without any additional configuration.  The older servers I needed to configure additional SNMP credentials before the “Monitoring and Collections” was working correctly.

Some devices such as a P4800 will need additional contract information added.  This is because the devices are all part of a package.  If you go into the device and edit the warranty and Contract information, you can modify the SAID or CarePackID and it will begins showing the correct information again.

Lastly, now that you’re up and running, you can logon to the “Insight Online” portal and see the status of your devices as well.

HP Insight Remote Support collects basic configuration information from your devices to help HP resolve problems more quickly and accurately. No business information is collected and the data is managed according to the HP Data Privacy policy. Configuration data collected includes:

1. Server model

2. Processor model & speed

3. Storage capacity & speed

4. Memory capacity & speed

5. Firmware/BIOS

6. Operating System

7. HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) presence

8. Power management