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Does UDT actually work?

Daran

Hi,
I've been trying to use UDT in order to ascertain whether there are ports in our DCs that should be shut down. In the first instance I want to find ports that are either:

Admin up/Oper down and have no port description - these are candidates for shutting down.
Admin up/Oper down but do have a port description - these require investigation as they were at one point valid on the network but are now potentially stale and need shutting down and the port description removing.

I have been attempting to use UDT for this… I have turned UDT on for every port on every device and have used a custom SWQL query with various filters to limit it to DC devices, Ethernet only ports, etc. and I would like to further limit it to ports that have been down for 30 days or more… however the Orion.UDT.UnusedPorts.DaysUnused field is causing me some concern.

It is either a number or 'Never' - my question is "What does 'Never' actually mean?"

If a port has the value 'Never' does that mean UDT thinks the port has never been used, never seen a device on the end of it, or does DaysUnused=Never mean that the port is contantly in use - i.e. it has never been unused?

I ran my query on the DC devices and found just 2 ports with a numerical value for DaysUnused and the rest were all 'Never' (7495 of them!!)

Has anyone else managed to understand this field and, more importantly, successfully written a query that shows inactive ports that are candidates for shutting down.

I also tried using Orion.NPM.Interfaces but that only collects information for ports that are actively being monitored - when it comes to detecting ports that are up/up with no port descriptions (and hence should be investigated) I won't be able to find them because they are not being monitored.

Surely someone, somewhere has come across this need before?

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udt

Accepted answers

donrobert5

That field you are asking about is limited for 30 days. If it is more than 30 day, it would appear as never.

So if UDT detects the Port as unused, that will be day one. It doesn't really get the value on how long it has been used, so it is just base on the first discovery for that port. If the port is unused, it will be day one and so on until it reaches 30 days and it will be never.

All comments

cnorborg

Well, remember that the devices only know since their last reboot. Solarwinds tends to remember most things for a year however.

On my Arista devices, Solarwinds looks like it will say "never" for ports that are currently in use. 😮😟 So that's not good.

On at least one Cisco box that's been up for a little over a year, I can see that the last usage was probably 51 weeks ago, and SW is saying "never" again. And some other ports on the same switch were active as recently as 7 weeks and still showing never. Other switches show the same. These switches have been managed for over a year, so…

I wouldn't trust it, look like it needs some work! No matter which way it gets the data, either by checking the last used time on the interfaces, or if its polling them for up/down.

I'd recommend you report your results as a bug, open a case. Hopefully they'll fix it, or at least apply some attention to it. Definitely needs work.

So, just to clear things up. NPM is mostly doing performance data over time, and checking the "here and now" state of things. UDT does do historical stuff, but is mostly about who's on what port and such. NPM only monitors the "interfaces" that you monitor. UDT only monitors the "ports" that you monitor.

NCM can sometimes be more useful. When it inventories and item, it gets all the info on all the ports for instance. There is a field there under NCM.Interfaces called "LastChange" that might be what you want? But, I haven't looked at it too closely, worth a shot though?

Daran

Hi @cnorborg thanks for replying… yes, half the trick is knowing which tables to use I guess. I'm going to look at combining UDT, NPM and NCM in the mother of all queries and see what I get - will post something here when I've got something worth looking at!!

donrobert5

Daran

That's useful info thanks @donrobert5 - IMHO it's a poor use of the word 'Never'… "unused never" is a double negative 😁. It would be better if it said ">30" or "Forever".

But at least you've cleared up part of the mystery - I just need a level of confidence that if a port is in the udt.unusedports table, that it really is unused… it would be great if SW could provide some more useful precanned but editable widgets on this topic.