The Oracle Server Hardware Management Agent (Hardware Management Agent) and associated Oracle Server Hardware SNMP Plugins (Hardware SNMP Plugins) provide a way to monitor and manage your server and server module's hardware using an operating system native SNMP agent.
This in-band functionality enables you to use a single IP address (the host's IP) for monitoring your servers and blade server modules, without having to connect the management port of the Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) service processor to the network.
The Hardware Management Agent and Hardware SNMP Plugins run on the host operating system of your Oracle servers, communicating with the Oracle ILOM service processor. The Hardware Management Agent service, called svc:/system/sp/management:default (called hwmgmtd in Solaris versions earlier than 11.2), regularly polls the service processor for information about the current state of the server. Hardware Management Agent can poll the service processor for hardware information over either the Host-to-ILOM Interconnect, available on Oracle latest servers, or KCS interface on previous generation servers. This information is then made available by Hardware Management Agent over SNMP using the Hardware SNMP Plugins.
In addition, the Hardware Management Agent maintains a separate log that contains information about the Hardware Management Agent status, which can be used for troubleshooting.