Unmanaged behaviour

Some of this sounds buggy and some of it is as designed. Let me run down the list and classify.

Buggy:

• Pinging an unmanaged node.
• Sending SNMP to an unmanaged node.
• Not showing the unmanaged blue circle on the Overview page.
• Authentication failure traps on the rediscovery schedule during unmanage.
  

As designed:

• Listing the node in places like availability statistics. Down time during an unmanaged period should not count against the node's availability (in fact, Orion shouldn't even know whether the node was up or down during unmanage), but it will still be listed there.
• Showing response time and packet loss gauges. Gauges in Orion always show the last polled value. These values shouldn't be updated during unmanage, but we'll still show you what they were last time we checked.
• Authentication failure traps at the time you change the community string to be wrong, even if the node is currently unmanaged. We try to validate the community string regardless of the node's current manage/unmanage state.
  

So let me make sure I understand you correctly:

If I have a node that is reporting 100% loss and I unmanage it for whatever reason (maybe I knew the device was going to be down but didn't get a chance to unmanage it before the device dropped).  The device still shows in the "Top 10 Nodes by Percent Packet Loss" and this is by design?  If I unmanage a device, I don't see why it should show up there.  If I unmanage it, I'm obviously not worried about packet loss, errors ,etc.

We are having a similar issue. I have a server that failed. We marked it unmanaged while we awaited onsite replacement. I marked it unmanaged and in Orion NPM it still shows the packet loss gauge at 100% and has left an alert in the "active alerts" section on my home page. I would think if a node was unmonitored it would clear these alerts. Was there ever a solution brought up for this?

Have you opened a Support ticket?

As a work around for the packet loss/latency lists, add a filter to this resource to not show the unmanaged devices.

Click Edit (assuming you have customise view permissions) on the Top XX resources where unmanaged node data is showing. Create a filter to exclude the unmanaged devices. I am not in front of an installation at the moment to give you the SQL filter, but look at the database and it will be straightforward to work out.

I would like functionality similar to stewie's suggestions.  When I'm doing maintenance on a device, I don't want alerts.  But I do want regular polling to still occur (or have a second switch that turns regular polling on/off).  The reason is so that while I'm doing maintenance, I can see the impact on the device of any changes that I make.

Yes. And I would stand on the side of "if it is unmanaged, don't do anything to it". If I unmanage some device, Orion should NOT go out and create activity.

Has anyone else reading this observed similar traffic with unmanaged nodes?

Yes, I have, and it's randomness coupled with persistence is driving me nu... is very exciting. We have about 15 unmanaged and offline nodes yet some are showing up and some aren't. In example below, Encoder-VM05 is one of eight identical offline unmanaged nodes, yet only Encoder-VM05 shows up in "high packet loss" alerts, others don't.

All of them also show "average CPU load" and other stats. They've been offline (shutdown) for over a month. Their total life span was less than a week. So this is "average" of what? Solarwinds monitoring the Land of the Dead?

The original post was in 2008. That was six years ago, and yet the dead and unmanaged nodes are still very much alive. This is sad.

denny.lecompte wrote: Have you opened a Support ticket?

Will opening a support ticket help? Why (isn't an issue reported on the forum by several users and admitted as buggy - enough)?

Hi akhasheni , Actually its not collecting data but then it would still appear as the data is already stored on DB for that particular node. (The data that was present from the previous poll before you unmanaged the node)