New Enhanced Reporting of Aggregated Data with DX NetOps 22.2.4

[Thomas.Story]

We took cognizance of your feedback around not being able to observe an event on the aggregate utilization of multiple interfaces or device metrics in order to determine where redundant links or devices are overburdened.  We know that as a capacity planner you need to understand aggregate metrics for groups of interfaces and devices responsible for delivering connectivity to remote locations so you can plan added capacity where needed.

With the DX NetOps 22.2.4 release, you can now configure aggregated components. You will be able to observe combined values rather than individual values by combining metric values from similar components, from either the same device or different devices.

You can create aggregated values for CPU, memory, and interfaces. For example, if you have a router with eight CPUs, and you want to view their CPU utilization collectively, you can combine the values of those CPUs into a single metric, as opposed to viewing the CPU utilization for each CPU. You can also combine values from different devices. Therefore, if you have ten edge routers, you can combine the WAN interfaces from those devices into a single metric value.

When developing this capability we incorporated the following requirements:

• Technology agnostic, will work with metric data provided by different certification types
• SNMP, CAMM, components can belong to different devices.
• If component's metrics polled have different poll rates, we aggregate metric data with the lowest poll rate.
• Added tolerances to the missed polls, composition availability/data completeness metric.
• Ability to define more than one strategy for aggregation in overall and aggregation strategy per metric.
• Provide modification history for aggregated components
• Support by NetOps services and APIs
• Scalability 10K+

  

Here is how this works in the NetOps Portal:

To Add a new component group, follow these steps:


You can now set thresholds on Aggregated Components.  Events will then include the aggregated component group name

Please see more details regarding this feature and new features in the 22.2.4 release here: What's New in DX NetOps 22.2.4  

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​Thomas Story

Product Line Manager/DX-NetOps

Broadcom Software

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[Alexander Zaeh]

Hi Thomas,

sounds interessting. Is it possible to combine the feature with rules? Like on interfaces to use an special characters or word in the ifAlias field. My thinking is how to maintenance the feature when an change is done, e.g. device ireplacement, and you didn´t get an infomation.

But I and my team will investigate the feature in detail, because it was something we wait for an long time.

Thanks

[Catalin Farcasanu]

Hi Thomas,

This was an enhancement long time requested by many. When I saw the Release Notes of 22.2.4 I searched specifically for details over aggregated components in the product documentation. I did not see any mention to the information you provided here. Please have it checked/completed with this information. There is indeed information on aggregated components, but there's no reference to any thresholds profiles that can be assigned to these components. It is mentioned just the reporting feature and not the thresholding one.

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Cătălin Fărcășanu
Senior Consultant
SolvIT Networks
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[Jeffrey Pinard]

So it appears there is an issue with the NetOps combined docs for Manage Aggregated Components (I've informed our docs engineer to fix asap).
But it's fine under the PM specific docs page:  https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/it-operations-management/performance-management/22-2/building/manage-aggregated-components.html

As far as Thresholding, it's treated like any other component/item.  You create a group of the type of items, and then select the aggregated MF and metric(s) to threshold on.  So there is no additional docs to call out aggregated items differently than a cpu, port, etc in thresholding docs.

The only caveat right now is the event will be created on the aggregated item (not on any device at this time), so you won't currently see these events in spectrum models/alarms.  We are working on future changes to see what we can do about that.

[Catalin Farcasanu]

Hi Jeff,

I would have a mention, nevertheless on the aggregated components page on the thresholding. Just a small comment, as you mentioned here, thresholding is available like for those like for any other component. I also assume that these components are synched by default with the PC. That's not mentioned either in the documentation. All the references are to configurations performed at DA level. 

I was actually referring the specified link that you posted, and not on the NetOps documentation.

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Cătălin Fărcășanu
Senior Consultant
SolvIT Networks
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[Jeffrey Pinard]

Yes, the aggregated components are synced to Portal. 
And will appear under a new menu item:  Inventory->Aggregated Components (AC)

In groups, there is a new Aggregated Components group under Inventory->All Items that contains all ACs.