A lot of HP admins will use monitoring software to alert on errors. Whether it's HP SIM or the new AlertMail feature that comes with ILO 4, or some other OS based monitoring... as long as it can detect HP issues and send emails, that's a good way to do it.
HP publishes it's MIBs and I've used Solarwind in addition to SIM to track and graph things like system temps, hardware status, etc. MRTG, Nagios, etc would all work just as well since it's just SNMP polling.
Going waaaay back, Compaq used to offer emailing capabilities in the agents... it worked okay, and the system itself could send an email if an error came up that didn't crash the system.
The problem is, what happens if you do have an error where the server dies? You need remote monitoring to handle that scenario.
HP SIM is kind of a resource hog, but it really does a decent job of keeping track of your servers.
Since most of the time, servers are somewhere in a room by themselves, having them beep when something happens isn't always going to get the response you want. There are the health LEDs on the front to indicate any problems. If you're in hearing range, you're probably also able to walk by and look for any amber lights, if remote alerting is simply not an option.
HP publishes it's MIBs and I've used Solarwind in addition to SIM to track and graph things like system temps, hardware status, etc. MRTG, Nagios, etc would all work just as well since it's just SNMP polling.
Going waaaay back, Compaq used to offer emailing capabilities in the agents... it worked okay, and the system itself could send an email if an error came up that didn't crash the system.
The problem is, what happens if you do have an error where the server dies? You need remote monitoring to handle that scenario.
HP SIM is kind of a resource hog, but it really does a decent job of keeping track of your servers.
Since most of the time, servers are somewhere in a room by themselves, having them beep when something happens isn't always going to get the response you want. There are the health LEDs on the front to indicate any problems. If you're in hearing range, you're probably also able to walk by and look for any amber lights, if remote alerting is simply not an option.