Is it possible to have Spectrum create an alarm, when a device is in Gray (Suppressed/Unknown) condition?

[Martin Del Toro]

Hi team, I have this case.

There is a Switch that is connected to another Switch, let us call it,  Switch A and Switch B.

Switch B is showed in Gray color.
Switch A is showed in Green color. However Switch A has an alarm due an Interface with a Bad Link Detected. The interface affected is Gi1/1/1 and Switch B is connected on this interface.

As Spectrum is not able to communicate with Switch B, its shows this device in Gray color.

Question: is there a way to trigger an alarm for this condition on Switch B? I know, that maybe the Switch B is Up and running and maybe there is not a valid reason to have an alarm triggered, but since Spectrum is not able to assert wether this device is UP or DOWN, can we have an alarm just to know that there is a Gray condition and that we have something to look at on Switch B?

I know, we already have the other alarm for Bad Link Detected in Switch A, and by looking at that alarm, we should be able to, after doing some troubleshooting to determine that there is a problem happening on Switch B.

Summarizing. Is there  way to view alarms on the "Alarm View" for Suppressed/Unknown devices (Showed in Gray color) and to have these alarms logged in the AlarmNOTIFIER.out file?

Greetings.

[Joseph Ackley]

Martin,

You can display the suppressed alarms in the Sectrum OneClick console. Reference https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleId=45169

You can send Suppressed alarms to AlarmNotifier by setting GET_GRAY_INITIAL_ALARMS in the .alarmrc file to true and restarting the AlarmNotifier process.

However, the reason this is NOT done by default is because, for a single outage, you can literally get thousands of Suppressed alarms.

I recommend knowledge article 13507 "How to configure Spectrum to alert on both the end model and the near end interface model connecting to the end model when there is an outage." located at https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleId=13507

Joe

[Martin Del Toro]

Thanks for the above suggestions Joe.

We was thinking on face the issue from another perspective, but not sure if this will work as expected. We want to disable the Port Fault Correlation issue, this is a feature of Fault Isolation.

As explained here: https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/it-operations-management/spectrum/10-4/managing-network/modeling-and-managing-your-it-infrastructure/fault-management/port-fault-correlation.html

Right now we have it configured as All connected Ports, but we are thinking that if we configure it as Disabled, this will cause Spectrum to Show alarms on the alarm view for the  devices on Suppressed/Unknown condition. Although these alarms will not be logged on the NOTIFIER.OUT file, as for this to happens we need to enable the GET_GRAY_INITIAL_ALARMS in the .alarmrc file to true, right?

Do you think this other approach can also helps?


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[Joseph Ackley]

Martin,

If you disable port fault correlation, you will get a critical alarm on the device model on the other side of the connection.

Joe

[Gregory Polenta]

Just to add to what Joe said, If you disable Port Fault Correlation you should then see something like this

  Port Fault Correlation: None
  Suppress Linked Port Alarms: yes

If you set both to No, device B would be red and you would get the Bad Link alarm on device A