Firewall Concepts and Configuration - HP Operations Manager

OVO Heartbeat Monitoring
Firewall Configuration in OVO
OVO Communication Concepts
There are different types of OVO heartbeat monitoring that can be
configured per node in the OVO Node Bank.
❏ Normal
❏ RPC Only (for Firewalls)
❏ Agent Sends Alive Packets
Normal Heartbeat Monitoring
If normal heartbeat monitoring is configured, the server first attempts to
contact the node using ICMP packages. If this succeeds, it will continue
to do the heartbeat monitoring using RPC calls. When an RPC call fails,
it will use the ICMP packages to find out if, at least, the system is alive.
As soon as this succeeds, the RPC calls are tried again.
RPC Only Heartbeat Polling (for Firewalls)
Since in firewall environments ICMP usually gets blocked, the RPC Only
heartbeat monitoring option configures the server so that only RPC calls
are used. Since RPC connections must be allowed through the firewall,
this will work even if ICMP gets blocked.
The disadvantage is that in the event of a system outage, the network
load is higher than with normal heartbeat monitoring because the RPC
connection is still being tried.
Agent Sends Live Packets
By selecting this option, the agent can be triggered to send ICMP
packages to the server reporting that the agent is alive. When such an
alive package is received at the server, it will reset the polling interval
there. If the polling interval expires without an alive package arriving,
the server will start the usual polling mechanism as configured to find
the agent’s status.
If alive packages are configured, ICMP packages are sent at 2/3 of the
configured heartbeat monitoring interval. This will guarantee that an
alive package will arrive at the server before the configured interval is
over.
Chapter 1 31