Community
- Command Central
- MVP Program
- Monthly Mission
- Blogs
- Groups
- Events
- Media Vault
Products
- Observability
- Network Management
- Application Management
- IT Security
- IT Service Management
- System Management
- Database Management
Content Exchange
- SolarWinds Platform
- Server & Application Monitor
- Database Performance Analyzer
- Server Configuration Monitor
- Network Performance Monitor
- Network Configuration Manager
- SQL Sentry
- Web Help Desk
Free Tools & Trials

Cisco Interface Name Change

Orion V9 SP1 - We have a Cisco 4506 switch. Recently we did a lot of renaming on various ports due to an infrastructure change. All we changed was the description in the switch config. Orion still displays the old value for these ports. Doing a rediscover, poll, refresh, node details etc... nothing will get Orion to read these new interface decsriptions.

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

All comments

kweise

Here is a link to a thread about this:

In our environment (8.5.1 SP3), I've had to go to force a rediscovery of the interface itself. (Right click the interface, select Interface Details and click the Rediscover button.)

The thread that I linked to above also has a few SQL commands you can run if you have a lot of interfaces to update.

vhcato

We have 8.5.1 SP3 in production and have not had this problem. Ours updates the web resources with new names when we update interface descriptions on IOS-based devices. The only problem we have had is in the case of some devices (such as 6500's), whereby if you remove an interface description, Orion will update with the next discovery, but if you then add a description back to the same interface, it will never update it in Orion. We get around that by not leaving descriptions blank on interfaces that are not in use, but instead giving them a description of "*".

Our test instance of V9 SP2 in the lab is a different story. It doesn't update the info on the web for any of the IOS-based devices when changes are made. Actually, the change is detected and the alias is changed, but the resources on the web don't reflect the new name. In addition, when the new name is discovered, there are two "interface name change" events that are logged; one stating the name has changed to the new name, and a second one immediately afterward stating that it has changed back to the old name. Also, the release notes for SP 2 state that the names used on CatOS interfaces are now discovered and used as identifiers, which works upon initial discovery, but will not update following subsequent changes.

Is this something that will be addressed in later release or SP? When dealing with thousands of interfaces, the administrative burden of manually changing the names in Orion for every change in the production environment can be significant. With things being as busy as they are today, we don't need that extra step to slow us down, especially since it is working in a previous release. Until this gets resolved, this may well be a show-stopper for us moving to v9.

FormerMember

Vic,

We're looking at this. Can't give you a timetable.

vhcato

Thanks Denny. I do appreciate your response.

Following Tim Danner's suggestion, I think I have a solution for the ones that populate the "InterfaceAlias" in the database by scheduling a SQL job to run the following query on a regular basis.

UPDATE Interfaces SET Caption = '', FullName = '' WHERE (InterfaceAlias <> '')

The only problem with this is that it logs an interface name change event for every interface to which the query applies, which in our case would be thousands.This is not good news for us because we are in the process of rationalizing toolsets within our company following a major acquisition, and some of the benefits of v9, as well as the web integration piece of the upcoming Orion NCM, are very attractive to us. We may be about to pull the trigger on buying some additional polling engines and other modules and components, but this may force us to wait a little while to see if this gets resolved before moving to V9. :(