Tuesday Tip: Monitoring System-Cleared Alarms
CA Spectrum Tuesday Tip by Roger Nason, Principal Support Engineer, November 17, 2011
Suggested procedure to increase visibility into short-term network failures
Description:
This is the legacy “Flash Green” feature that was included in Spectrum’s legacy console (SpectroGRAPH) and was re-introduced in Spectrum r9.2 at customer request to meet similar requirements of “green” status devices with alarms that occur and then automatically cleared.
Devices fall into the system cleared or “flash green" bucket under very limited circumstances:
- They are currently green…AND
- The previous alarm was cleared by the system and not a user…AND
- The system cleared alarm had not been acknowledged
Solution:
To use this feature in Spectrum 9.2.X:
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Access the Locater tab > Devices > All Devices with System Cleared Alarms
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Create a Global Collection from this search and select real-time update (See screenshot #1 below)
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Select the devices for which you want this feature enabled
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Right-click and select ‘Track System Cleared Alarms’ (See screenshot #2 below). Repeat this step for all models you wish to track system cleared alarms on.
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Anytime one of these devices is in the "flash green" state it will be placed in the collection
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Right-click and select ‘Acknowledge System Cleared Alarms’ to have the model removed from the global collection (See screenshot #3 below)
To test it:
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Change the SNMP Community String to something bogus on one of the devices
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Poll the device
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A major alarm will be generated for loss of management agent
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Put the correct community string back
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Poll device
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Device model turns green
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Notice the device model is added to the global collection