False alarm from probe or probes

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

We received an alert for from a probe that is incorrect.

For example the CDM probe for a Drive space issue on a server, but the size of the drive and amount of space are wrong.

Or a process alarm is coming but the process is not down and has never been down

Or when we check the configuration, or the MCS or the cdm.cfg file for the robot the alarm is for we do not even see that this alarm is enabled.

Why are we getting this alarm and how to do correct / stop it?


NOTE: this could be for any local monitoring probe such as processes, cdm, etc.

Environment

UIM 9.X and earlier
ANY probe
ANY robot.

Cause

A robot was cloned that had the robotname and robotip set in the robot.cfg file
When the cloned machine was activated with a new IP address and Hostname the robot.cfg was not updated manually as is required
and so all information being sent from the robot is sending the incorrect IP and robotname into UIM.

 

Resolution

This will be caused by a system that was cloned and now has a new hostname and IP address, but the robot.cfg has the old robot name and IP address.

This is why when you go to the cdm probe on the correct machine you do not find the  drive in monitoring but you are still getting an alarm, or the values are completely incorrect, because they're actually coming from a different machine.

One clue for this is that the device which the alarms attach to will have an IP address under "Other IP addresses" that is not actually assigned to that machine.

The machine that actually owns the IP listed here is likely the machine that has received the cloned image and still has the identifiers for the original robot.

Another way to find and correct this problem is to set up a windows task or cron job on the hub.
Set it to go off every 30 seconds and run a netstat -ano command can append the output to a file and run that for 30 minutes

when it is complete import the new file to excel and sort by IP address.

then compare the IP address to the list of IP address shown in IM for the hub.

You will find one or more that does not show up in IM.

You can then connect to this device(s) and correct the settings to resolve this issue.
 

Additional Information

See this KB for best practices on cloning with UIM.