This depends slightly on the operating systems you’re running on the servers, but in general, it is possible to obtain alerts from HP ProLiant servers and Smart Array RAID controllers.
The full driver and software support listing for your DL380 G5 systems is listed here.
SNMP and a monitoring solution is the best approach… But you can augment that with some of HP’s tools. HP offers the HP Systems Insight Manager, which is available for download and also comes with the servers. This is ideal for collections of servers. If you’re looking for one-off alerts without building a management or monitoring infrastructure, you can simply install the HP Management Agents (aka ProLiant Support Pack).
For standalone Linux systems, I’ll have the agents send traps via email. I’ll usually configure the support pack with defaults or a custom bundle, then edit /opt/hp/hp-snmp-agents/cma.conf and change the trapemail line to point to the recipient address:
########################################################################
# trapemail is used for configuring email command(s) which will be
# executed whenever a SNMP trap is generated.
# Multiple trapemail lines are allowed.
# Note: any command that reads standard input can be used. For example:
# trapemail /usr/bin/logger
# will log trap messages into system log (/var/log/messages).
########################################################################
trapemail /bin/mail -s 'HP Insight Management Agents Trap Alarm' systems@1234.net
If you’re running Linux and don’t want to install the full HP management suite, you can develop a script around the cciss_vol_status utility to query controller/disk status. Also see: Installing HP Agents on OpenFiler