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No, really, how DO you get UCS Blade Status?

A topic that much has been said about and people have gotten working, but I can't find how anybody fixed it!  Does anybody have a step-by-step they followed to fix this:

Screenshot from 2017-02-24 16-22-57.png

  • I believe jest4kicks​ had a thread working on that

  • Yeah, I was giving it a shot.  Unfortunately, it went nowhere.  As far as I can tell, Solarwinds never really flushed-out the API calls required to pull this information.

    We ended up just polling individual blades as nodes, and we setup a trap-based alert to act on faults generated by either the FI's or the blades, themselves.

  • stevenwhunt​ is this something meant to be addressed via NPM (core)?

  • I guess, fundamentally, if no one knows how this works, why is it included in NPM and/or why isn't there a workable walk-through for it?

  • Wow.  I expected / assumed that you'd get full information from UCS into NPM by creating the SNMP community read-only string on the UCS chassis and then discovering it with NPM.

    Then I expect more information would be available from the servers on the blade by configuring them for WMI and discovering them via WMI with NPM.

    Are you telling me this doesn't work?

  • I had assumed the same.  I had assumed that this was something I was doing wrong, too.

  • To be honest what you are doing is twopart here:

    1: solarwinds can poll anything through SNMP as long as you have an IP. jest4kicks​ got this to work through basically generic SNMP polling (which is what UNDP can do). See Cisco UCS trap-based monitoringdmeiser

    2: not much appears to be configured or set up for UCS, and the blame is not entirely solarwinds. Cisco UCS *is* in many ways a mess.

    I'm copying cobrien​ and stevenwhunt​ on this. Is there an advised method of polling UCS for info through NPM? As rschroeder​ is pointing out.

  • I would love better clarification on this..... But as far as my understanding goes (And it is limited) this a limitation of SNMP, not really Solarwinds.

    I don't think SNMP was designed (ahem, 5 or 6 decades ago?) to include SNMP community within SNMP communities. Or multiple SNMP communities under one SNMP community and that is what UCS is.

    A similar situation is a box that houses multiple vm's (I forget the name of the firewall I'm thinking of) and each of those vm's has it's own SNMP mibs.

    It would be nice if we could get an overriding MiB that communicates with the sub MiBs (definitely needs clarification). But again, I don't think SNMP was imagined to be used like that.

    I suppose an ESXi server is a good example, we can get the SNMP information from ESXi but we cannot get the ESXi SNMP to give use the SNMP status of the internal workings of the VM's running on it. In order to do that we need to use the VMware API.

    Like I say, I'd like to be clearer on this as it's some thing that comes up quite often for me.

    Hopefully I am wrong and there is a FAR better answer, especially one that goes: It's done like this!

  • Right or wrong, the original statement stands:  If it's not possible to do this, why is it included in the release product with [incomplete] documentation to get it working?  My only thought, then, is that it was working in the lab environment and there must be a way to get it working.

  • Your question definitely still stands and I would like an answer to that to emoticons_happy.png

    It's grand to have the chassis, but would be nice to see the blades as well in a more joined up way.