newbie help - solarwinds shows port warning then shutdown, network admin says no activity on port

Question

Hi,

Looking for some newbie guidance, please help.

SolarWinds is alerting (email) us to a port\interface going into warning and then shutdown.

My network admin is telling me to go fly a kite, the port is in admin shutdown and has no activity for 300+ days.

Where do I start looking to flush this out? I look in Message Center at the switch details and sure enough there are two entries showing the port\interface going into warning and then shutdown (attached screenshot).

Where do I look for the details that trigger these events?

thoughts?

Events.jpg

cnorborg · Accepted Answer

So, I'm guessing your using the OOTB (Out-of-the-box) alert on when an interface goes down?   This is probably the issue.  And remember, you definitely DON'T need to enable all the OOTB alerts.  Quite a few of them you might not want to.   Many folks don't care if an interface goes down, so they leave this one off.

But, that being said, the alert isn't written in the best manner.  It looks solely at the "Operational Status" of the interface, not the "Administrative Status".   The operational status of an interface is whether it is actually up or down.   The administrative status is whether it's enabled or not, and in your case it's not.

If you Duplicate the alert and edit it, you can easily modify it to ignore a port if its shut down.  It should look like below when you're done.   By default it only has the first condition, ie: Interface Status is equal to Down.    You need to add the second line in that section.

I haven't tested this, but it should work.