Skip to main content
Start a Conversation

Unsolved

This post is more than 5 years old

PebbleMatt

39 Posts

9329

November 19th, 2007 14:00

Status Unknown and wrong Agent Information

Has anyone ever experienced the following problem ...

Basically, a handful of servers are being detected properly and their status displayed in ITA, and then seemingly randomly some of them appear to stop displaying there status, and instead display a status unknown icon.

These servers are listed under the Servers section (not the Unknown devices section), but their status icons display a grey question mark (for unknown status). If I click on the Device Details, it has some of the information, but not all. The Software Agent Information looks wrong, e.g. they tend to display the "Windows Management Instrumentation" agent instead of the "Server Administrator" and "Inventory Collector" agents.

If I log in to one of the affected servers, and stop the WMI service, and then use the "Refresh Inventory" in ITA, the WMI service gets started up automatically on the server, and in ITA, the correct software agents are displayed, as well as the status showing play (green tick).

Then during a following scheduled Status Poll, it appears to go back to a status of unknown with the Windows Management Instrumentation agent name being listed instead. There are two slight variations on this:
1) the WMI agent is the only agent displayed, and the agent itself has an okay status while the server is listed as unknown.
2) the other agents (e.g "Server Administrator" and "Inventory Collector") are listed but in an unknown status, and the WMI agent is also listed but with an okay status.

Thanks

OMNavigator

291 Posts

November 20th, 2007 02:00

IT Assistant (ITA) detects particular agents (like OMSA, OMCI, etc.) on the managed system to classify it as a server, client, printer etc. A noteworthy point is that as long as ITA does not detect any known agent, the device would be listed under "Unknown" group. Whenever ITA recognizes a known agent, it moves the device from "Unknown" to appropriate classified group like "Servers". Now comes the important part. Once ITA has identified that a device is, say, a server, it will forever remain classified under the "Servers" group no matter whether the agent (e.g. OMSA) continues to run on it or is even uninstalled! This is due to the fact that a real hardware system cannot change - i.e. no matter what you do, a server cannot morph itself into a printer or a switch!
 
If a device gets classified under one of the known groups, and thereafter, ITA is unable to communicate with the appropriate agent on that system (say, during the next discovery cycle), then you would see the grey unknown icon.
 
To analyze your problem I would perform the following checks:
1) Check which protocol are you using for Discovery - SNMP, CIM, IPMI?
2) Whether the agent (OMSA) is installed and running properly on that system? Are all the services up and running - or you may want to try restarting the OMSA service.
3) Whether ITA can communicate with the agent? This can be checked using the ITA's inbuilt Troubleshooting tool - invoke it by right clicking the device and then run appropriate tests (Ping, SNMP test etc). If the test fails, you know the problem. A common root cause is a firewall or anti-virus software that is blocking the communication.
4) Also, it would be a good idea to check whether you are using different protocols to monitor different Discovery Ranges. If yes, check whether the servers in question belong to more than one range by any chance.
 

jpepin

8 Posts

January 18th, 2008 13:00

This happens to my systems from time to time even with the new ITA 8.1 version and SA 5.3 loaded on my clients. Whenever they change from green checks to gray question marks the following shows up in the system alert log "Enterprise: .1.3.6.1.4.1.8072.4 Trap Ids:Generic:6 Specific:2; ()". A little while later and the system re-appears green. Whenever I catch a system in that unknown stated and run the Troubleshooting Tool everything checks out fine and the agents are running fine on the systems so I just ignore it but I would like to know why this happens.

Was this post helpful?

View All

Top