So far, I have not been able to identify any differences. That doesn't mean there aren't any, I just can't find them as of yet. The boxes are the same, OS is the same, Oracle distro is the same, the env variables are the same, the HQ Agent is installed from the same archive and thus have the same JRE. I checked the oracle processes running on both boxes and they appear to be the same as well.
I changed the log to debug and it prints out that it found ORACLE_HOME, but for whatever reason it cannot discover the Oracle server that is running. That is about the only useful information in the log output as far as I can tell.
This is very disconcerting...if I were an OPS guy and this happened, I would never use this product because I would not trust it to accurately detect things. I happen to be on the dev side and I am researching Hyperic HQ as a possible recommendation for the OPS team. Untill I can figure this out, Hyperic HQ has vote of no-confidence with me. 😞