DX NetOps

Spectrum community,

I have created a Fanout model to force Spectrum to monitor a specific set of ports used for SAN connections.

Last evening, one of the boxes connected to the Fanout model shut down. Not the ports, the whole box.

So now I have an "Inferred connection contact status lost" on my Fanout, even though the neighbor from the other side is responding (ports and box). 

Are you aware of a way to make this alarm be raised only when all connections leading to the Fanout model go down? Otherwise I think that the best alternative at this point would be to create one Fanout for each box.

Best regards,

Zacchi

Hi Zacchi,

  Can you provide a little more detail?   Can you just connect those 2 devices together?  Do you need the fanout?  Are you only using the fanout so you can monitor the ports?  If you don't connect the ports to anything you can still monitor the ports.  You need to set these to true if there's no connection on the port:

ok_to_poll

pollportstatus

generateportstatusalarms

Spectrum will monitor the ifadmin and ifoper on the port if those 3 attributes are enabled.  And if the whole device goes down you still get the "device down" alarm.  Would that work?  If not, maybe more detail would help.

Cheers

Jay 

Hi Jay,

I have a policy in place to automatically enable port monitoring if NetworkLinkType is not "No link", that is why I need these ports to be connected to something. I could connect them directly, but it wouldn't be realistic as the link is not direct.

These ports are being used by SAN switches that are not modeled in Spectrum, so to monitor the ports I have created this Fanout model representing the SAN box. My idea is that, if both interfaces were down, the Fanout would alarm and I would know that the SAN boxes are isolated from the Network.

Makes sense?

Thanks for your help!

Regards,

Zacchi

Gotcha...and thank you for the detail.  I think your solution of 1 fanout to the interface (don't connect the fanouts to each other, that causes other problems) would be sufficient.  Either that or if you do want them connected, you might find the WA_Link a better solution here as that enables port monitoring by default.  And if you don't want the alarms on the WA_Link you can set the Fault Isolation (on the VNM in the Fault Isolation area) for WA_Links to be Transparent.

Cheers
Jay

H Jay,

Thanks, guess I will do as you suggested and create one Fanout model per port.

A WA_Link is also a good option, but not a good representation of what it actually is there in between.

Regards,

Zacchi

I'm not quite following the description vs the picture.  In the picture, I see two devices connected to each other via a Fanout.  The device on the right goes down and you get an alarm on the Fanout because from what I see, the connection is through the Fanout.  That looks like Spectrum is behaving correctly based on the screenshot.  Are there more connections involved than just what is pictured?  From your description, I get the idea that you wanted to Fanout to stay green and the device on the right to alarm.  Is that correct?  That would happen if you had more devices connected to the Fanout that were also up since Spectrum could say that the Fanout is fine because the other connected devices are still reachable.  In your example, since there are only two devices connected to the Fanout and one of them is down, Spectrum is going to put the fault on the Fanout.  Make sense?

Hi Robert,

I understand where you come from and it seems that the Fanout is representing a black box connecting the devices, but in fact the Fanout is representing a device (SAN box) being served by both connections.

I was expecting it to alarm if both ports connecting to it came down, but seeing it from your angle made clear to me why Spectrum did what it did.

Regards,

Zacchi