Setup hourly HPE Insight Remote Support Service checking

@DeanColpitts

In a previous post, I mentioned we utilize HPE Insight Remote Support (IRS) at all our client sites, and discovered the lovely undocumented “feature” that IRS has, which is a tendency not to start after a Windows server reboot after an IRS update. This great undocumented feature defeats the entire purpose of IRS – monitoring and alerting your HPE hardware. After getting burned by this feature three or four times in a month where customers noticed hardware faults (via amber alert lights on the equipment) before we did since IRS was not running to alert us, I decided it was time to write a script to check IRS hourly and alert us if it wasn’t running.

To configure Windows to send an alert if the HP IRS Service is stopped, create the following two files (file contents are at the end of this post) on the IRS server:

  • check_irs_service_status.cmd – which is the wrapper that will call PowerShell from Task Scheduler
  • check_irs_service_status.ps1 – which is the actual PowerShell script that executes the service status check

Lastly, we need to schedule check_irs_service_status.cmd to run hourly. I’ve set 2 minutes after the hour in the example shown below, but you can adjust as required.

schtasks /create /tn "Hourly IRS Service Check" /tr c:\Windows\check_irs_service_status.cmd /sc minute /mo 60 /st 00:02:00 /rp "*" /ru "%userdomain%\%username%"

By default, the SMTP from address will be the netbios computer name of the IRS server @ the User’s DNS Domain FQDN (i.e. IRS-SERVER@JBGEEK.NET).  The SMTP to address will be support @ the User’s DNS Domain FQDN (i.e. SUPPORT@JBGEEK.NET), and the SMTP server will be mail @ the User’s DNS Domain FQDN (i.e. MAIL.JBGEEK.NET).  You can determine what these will be by checking the system’s environment variables with SET from a command prompt.  You can customize these settings in the “Send-MailMessage” command if necessary.

All that is left to do is to stop the service and test run check_irs_service_status.cmd to verify the Send-MailMessage works properly in your environment.

 

check_irs_service_status.cmd

rem --- begin cut and paste of notepad c:\windows\check_irs_service_status.cmd
@echo off
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -noprofile -File C:\Windows\check_irs_service_status.ps1
exit /b
rem --- end cut and paste of c:\windows\check_irs_service_status.cmd ---

 

check_irs_service_status.ps1

###--- begin cut and paste of notepad c:\windows\check_irs_service_status.ps1
### Check_irs_service_status.ps1
### @deancolpitts – http://blog.jbgeek.net
### 2016.01.27
### This script will check the status of the server HPRSMAIN and alert via email if the service is stopped.

$Service = Get-Service -name HPRSMAIN
$Service.Status
if ($Service.Status -eq "Stopped") {
 $CurrentTime = Get-Date
 Send-MailMessage -From "$env:computername@$env:userdnsdomain" -To "support@$env:userdnsdomain" -Subject "$env:computername - HP IRS Service is stopped!!!" -Body "The HP IRS Service is stopped on $env:computername.$env:userdnsdomain at approximately $CurrentTime." -Priority High -DNO onSuccess, onFailure -SmtpServer "mail.$env:userdnsdomain"
}

###--- end cut and paste of notepad c:\windows\check_irs_service_status.ps1

 

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