Alerting when a Cisco Trunk port goes down

you can set the interface to be "unpluggable" it will then not alert if this goes down.

Where do i set this within Orion?

I don't know that Orion captures anything at the interface level that identifies whether the interface is a trunk or not.  One thing you could do it to set up a yes/no interface custom property.  Using the custom property, you could set your advanced alert trigger condition to Type of Property to Monitor - Interface, Trigger Alert when all of the following apply, then create two simple conditions - one where Interfaces | Custom Properties | your trunk custom property is equal to Yes and then on where Interfaces | Interface Status | Interface Status is equal to Down.  That should get you an alert anytime one of the trunk interfaces you've set the custom property to Yes goes down. 

Questionario is also correct about setting your access ports to unplugged.  You shouldn't get alerted for ports you've set to unplugged.

Hope this helps!

Goliath,

You can set interfaces to unplugged by editing the properties of the interface.  Go to the Manage Nodes page, find your switch and expand it to show the interfaces.  Select the interface or interfaces you want to set as unplugged and click the Edit Properties button.  In the General section under the Interface name, there is a check box that says 'Display interface as unplugged rather than down.'  Just check that check box and click the Submit button.

Kweise - I can see how that would work, however I really don't fancy editing the properties of 19,000 switch ports to tell NPM that they are access rather than trunk :-(

Is up/down (device connected or not to port?) status maintained and statistics collected on "unpluggable" interfaces?  This is all I could find in the NPM Admin Guide and implies only alerts are suppressed.

Yeah, sorting through and clicking 19,000 switch ports isn't my idea of a fun time either!  Your other option would be to create a Universal Device Poller to search for whether an interface is trunking or not.  This OID (1.3.6.1.4.1.9.5.1.9.3.1.8 ) returns two values, 1 = trunking and 2 = notTrunking.  Entering this OID when you create a new UnDP will name it vlanPortIslOperStatus.  You'll need to create the UnDP before creating the advanced alert. (or you can download it from the Content Exchange - )

I've never tried creating an alert on this so you'll have to play around with it a bit to see if it will work, but here's a start:

The UnDP actually polls the node as a whole, not individual interfaces, so the Type of Property to Monitor for the first two simple condition statements needs to be set to Custom Node Poller. I "think" you'll want to check that the status is trunking.  If that doesn't work, try checking for a status equal to 1.  In order to get to the interface selection to show up in the simple condition statement, I changed the type of property to monitor to Interface.

****I've never tried having two different property types in the same alert, therefore I can't tell you if that will really work or not.****

Let me know if this makes sense or not.  Hopefully it will at least get you started.

if you dont want to click through 19k interfaces and you dont have that many trunks you can also just mark all of the interfaces at once and set them to be unpluggable.

you can then uncheck the box for your trunk links... thats the way I did it :)

EDIT:

@rgward: yes, the interface is polled just like all other interfaces, it will just not appear under "Down Interfaces" as it will never receive the status down (it will be unplugged instead). you will also not be alarmed on it unless you have configured an alarm to do so.

Thanks Questionario!   Glad to hear it works that way.  We've hesitated to go the unpluggable route but this clears the doubt.  Thanks again!

I have tried this.. The OID works fine returning values, but I dont seem to have the same choices you have when adding in the advanced alert.

It complains about using interface status when I am also using a node alerm in the conditions already..

Any ideas?