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Switch Monitoring Feature Needed

We are a Nortel shop and I have all of my Baystack devices monitored with orion. We don't monitor all the user ports on the switches just the uplink ports and up/down.

One common problem we have is that we often miss switch failures when these Bay Stack devices are stacked and a switch that is not the base module fails.

Heres the setup...

We have a network closet in the hospital that has 4 Nortel 24 port switches stacked together. The first switch in the stack is the base module with the uplink to the core and is the switch that has the management IP. The other 3 switches are slaves. If one of the other 3 switches fails Orion nevers sees an alarm and we never know there is a failure until the customer calls. The only time we see an alarm is when the 1st switch fails and the management IP no longer responds to polling.

Would it be possible, when setting up switch stacks, to have the NPM show how many switches are in the stack and using SNMP query each member of the stack for availability?

Sr. Network Administrator

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All comments

2020

I presume when a switch fails, this would be seen in the log. If that's the case, you could output the logs via syslog and alert on that.

Don331

You need to give each switch in the stack an IP address. That way you can monitor them individually with SNMP.

Don Barry
Aegis Mortgage Corp
Houston, TX

jonchill

We have a similar setup using 3COM switch in a stack with a single management address when I add that management address I get a list of all the switches in the stack and it will monitor and report on any of those switches even though they are slaves of the primary in the stack.

I would say that it could be an SNMP issue with the Nortel if it doesn't show all the devices in the stack when the management address is added to Orion.

As 2020 said, if they support syslog this maybe your only option.

HTH

Jon

tpelley

I am also setting monitoring on a number of 3Com nodes with multiple switches in each stack. I have been struggling with the set up. When I enter the management IP I see all of the units in the stack, but the only way I can see to monitor them is to monitor the Management port of each unit.

The problem with this method is that if one of the units in the stack goes down, Orion notes that the interface no longer exists and ceases to collect data for that interface. To correct this I have had to delete and recreate the monitored interface. We monitor hundreds of stacks and this method is just not practical.

Is there a way to have Orion alert me when one of the units in a stack of switches goes down?

Terry Pelley
Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.

vhcato

Do these devices pop an entry in the log when a switch in the stack fails? If so, can you forward this syslog message to Orion and have it alert via a syslog rule?

jonchill

Unfortunatley up to now I've not found a syslog feature on the 3COM kit, even there XRN core kit does not have syslog functionality.

Hence our move to Cisco.

Thanks

Jon

IT Infrastructure Manager
Pilgrim Hospital
UK

tpelley

On the SS3 series of switches there is a syslog feature. The switch will send an event to a syslog server if a unit in a stack fails. The problem with this for me is that I have 156 remote sites to manage. Each with a minumum of 2 switches. The time it would take to configure each stack is prohibitive, hence the decision to purchase Orion.

I have been able to set Orion up to monitor the management port on each switch in a stack. This works, but it's a lot of interfaces to monitor and in my testing, I have not been completely happy with the way Orion handles the event of an interface going down.

Its unfortunate that I can use the mib browser in the Engineers edition of SolarWinds to poll a stack of switches and get the up/down status of each unit in the stack but Orion is not able to get results from this MIB.

Terry Pelley.
Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.

pguenther

We have all BPS 2000 switches from Nortel and in setting Orion up today, I called Nortel and found that you can set the up to syslog. Try this

logging remote address x.x.x.x
logging remote enable
logging remote level critical