Any Happy IT Manager or ESX Administrator will always give credit of his / her happiness to their IT Monitoring System(s). There're no exception to monitoring in the datacentre - Whether it's UPS, network equipments or the servers.
The blanket rule is - All systems MUST be monitored & alerted appropriately.
With proper monitoring in-place, you can relax in a bar with your boss or Incident Manager rather than sitting in a round table conference every morning !!

Many tools are available in the market (e.g., Tivoli, MOM, Insight Manager), but the real challenge lies in - budget, approval process, resourcing, relevant skill, knowledge - The list goes on and on and on ....

In this article, I'm going to cover how to quickly setup your ESX hardware monitoring for your HP Servers using HP Insight Manager.

The steps are only for HP Hardware monitoring (email alerting not covered here).

Step 1: Download HP Management Agents for VMware ESX Server from http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/25469.html

Step 2: Copy & Extract downloaded file on your ESX Server.
e.g., # tar -zxvf hpmgmt-7.5.1a-VMware.tgz

Step 3: Enable Port 280
# esxcfg-firewall -o 280,tcp,out,sim-cert

Step 4: Run the setup
# ./hpmgmt.sh install
Select all default options when prompted.

Step 5: Optional - Edit the snmp configuration file to include your customized information:
# vi /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf

The only fields which you may want to change are -
trapsink <Your trapsink server>
syscontact <Your Name>
syslocation <Your Location>

Step 6: Open browser on your pc & type
https://<servername>:2381/ or http://<servername>:2301

Step 7: Login as root

All done !! You've completed the Hardware Monitoring setup of your ESX Servers (HP Hardware).