Describes the polling principles involved in installing IBM Tivoli Network Manager IP Edition. Describes the poll definitions that are included in the IBM Tivoli Network Manager IP Edition installation. Describes how to set up IBM Tivoli Network Manager IP Edition after you have installed the product.
This publication is intended for administrators who need to install and set up IBM Tivoli Network Manager IP Edition. This publication is intended for administrators responsible for the maintenance and availability of IBM Tivoli Network Manager IP Edition. Describes how to use IBM Tivoli Network Manager IP Edition to troubleshoot network problems identified by the product.
This publication is for advanced users who need to customize the operation of IBM Tivoli Network Manager IP Edition.
About polling the network
For each polling definition assigned to the policy there may be a different set of network entities in scope based on further filtering. For each polling definition assigned to the policy, the device class limits the devices in scope based on the class selection. No response to ping packets is received within the time specified in the poll definition.
To filter at the interface level, the poll definition must be set up for interface filtering. Based on the polling mechanisms, the poll definition type limits the scope of the poll operation in which it is used. An event is generated when the activation threshold condition defined in the poll definition is met and cleared when the clear threshold condition is met.
By default, the data tag has the same name as the survey definition, but you can change this to suit your data tagging needs.
Enabling and disabling polls 11
Use the survey policy editor to create a full-featured survey policy with multiple survey definitions and complete scoping utilities. Use the survey policy editor to create a full-featured survey policy with multiple survey definitions and complete scoping features. Click the name of the survey policy copy in the list to open the survey policy editor.
Opens the Survey Definitions panel where you can specify one or more survey definitions to add to the survey policy. You can further filter the scope of the survey policy by filtering the scope of each of the survey definitions included in this survey policy. Using the Survey Policy Wizard, you can create a simple survey policy with the following limited survey definitions and scope properties.
On the Poll Policy Scope Details page, select the check boxes of the required network views.
Creating new poll definitions 23
Use the Poll Definition Editor to create new poll definitions with the following poll definition types: Cisco remote ping, Juniper remote ping, SNMP link state. You modify poll definitions in the poll definition editor; the steps you follow vary depending on the reconciliation definition type. Use the poll definition editor to guide you through the steps to create a new poll definition.
You can change some of the general survey definition properties and the properties related to the survey definition type. Use the Poll Definition Editor to change the following poll definition types: Cisco remote ping, Juniper remote ping, and SNMP link state.
Deleting poll policies
Deleting poll definitions
Managing adaptive polling 51
This polling policy provides accelerated pings at 10-second intervals to devices that do not respond to the default chassis polling policy. You must enable this polling policy to enable the adaptive polling described in this scenario. Default chassis poll policy Ping polls all chassis devices in the current network domain.
The ConfirmDeviceDown polling policy polls all devices within the network view of Initial Ping Failure Events every 10 seconds. You must set the Initial Ping Failure Events network view as the scope of the ConfirmDeviceDown polling policy. You can change the frequency of accelerated ping polling by modifying the ConfirmDeviceDown polling policy and modifying the interval in seconds between polling operations.
Note: Changing the polling policy interval changes the Tally value for the same accelerated polling duration. If the poll policy detects that an interface on a router has exceeded the threshold, the poll generates a POLL-HighDiscardRate event for the router. This polling policy determines whether an interface on a device drops more than a minimum percentage of the total number of packets it processes.
The HighDiscardRate SNMP poll policy performs an SNMP threshold poll on all routers in the current network domain every 30 minutes. The ConfirmHighDiscardRate polling policy polls all devices within the devices that have at least one interface event for HighDiscardRate network view every five minutes. You must assign the Devices that have at least one interface event for HighDiscardRate network view as the scope of the ConfirmHighDiscardRate polling policy.
You can change the frequency of accelerated SNMP threshold polling by editing the ConfirmHighDiscardRate poll policy and changing the interval in seconds between polls. Create a polling policy scoped to the network view you created in the previous step that intensifies polling of the devices in that network view.
Administering network
Run the script program itnm_poller.pl to get the status of various poll policies as shown in the following example. You can see the ID for each poll policy in the command output. To set a limit, set the PollDataQueueLimit parameter to the appropriate number of packets in the $NCHOME/etc/precision/NcPollerSchema.cfg file for your poller.
Large increases in the number of network events can slow down the polling process, ncp_poller. You can set an upper limit on the number of events that the poller reads. Use this information to understand the guidelines related to storage capacity calculation to help you determine whether Network Manager can accommodate an increase in the storage limit for historical polled data.
Use this information to learn how to calculate storage capacity to help you determine whether Network Manager can handle an increase in the storage limit for historical polled data. Note: In the example, the SNMP poll specifies a count of three data points for the ifInDiscards, ifInErrors, and bandwidth historical poll data. If there is too much historical poll data in the database, you can use the poll data cleanup script to delete a subset of the historical poll data.
PollDataRowCount The number of rows in the ncpolldata.polldata table after the poller has reduced the data. Tip: Set a threshold for the number of packets that are queued for processing. When the threshold is exceeded, you are warned in the survey log. 1 PollDataQueueSize Number.
This table contains records of the entities that fall within the scope of polling policies. Fix Pack 4 The chassis records are output first, then the interface records, as shown in the following example.
Troubleshooting ping
Note: Repeat this action only if there are changes in the list of IP addresses whose polling you want to monitor. Periodically, or when needed for troubleshooting purposes, take a snapshot of the current ping polling status within the domain specified in the previous step. The results of the operation are stored in the pollLog database table in the NCMONITOR schema.
Report on subjects not being surveyed. Run the polled or unpolled entities status report from the Network Manager polling process. This command outputs two lists: a list of IP addresses you want to poll and a list of IP addresses that are not being polled. You can see at a glance if any of the IP addresses you want to poll are not being polled.
The NCMONITOR ping poll status tables enable diagnostic operations to be performed on network ping polling.
About event enrichment
The incident gateway assigns a state to the incident based on the Severity, Tally, and Type fields of the incident. A Network Manager health check event is passed from the Event Gateway to the Failover plugin.
Configuring event
Note: The RCA plugin does not reread the RCASchema.cfg configuration file or the RCA stitches at this stage. This domain is used to enable the script to read the relevant DbLogins.cfg file to connect to and update the relevant Event Gateway plugin databases. Note: You can run the script for only one plug-in at a time. Plug-in names for use in this command line option are as follows.
For example, you can list the event maps and event states that each plug-in subscribes to. Use ncp_gwplugins.plscript to list plug-in information the script is located on. This domain is used to enable the script to read the appropriate DbLogins,cfg file to connect to the appropriate Event Gateway plug-in databases.
In this example, the PnniIfStateis event map is added to the subscription list for the RCA plugin. This domain is used to enable the script to read the relevant DbLogins,cfg file in order to connect to and update additional Event Gateway databases. Use this information to understand how an event is processed as it passes through the RCA plug-in.
Domain points to the script that needs to read DbLogins.domain.cfg so that it can connect to and update the correct Event Gateway plugin databases. To make service-affected events more meaningful to operators, you can configure the SAE extension to enter customer-related information in the Summary field of a service-affected event. You can configure the SAE plugin to generate more SAE types than the three provided by default.
For example, you can configure the plugin to create SAE events for MPLS VPN edge entities (one type of SAE) and for MPLS VPN core entities (another type of SAE). The configuration file for the MPLS VPN SAE service types in the SAE plugin is the SAEMplsVpn.cfg configuration file.
Configuring root-cause
Network Manager
