Best Practice to Enable Spectrum Port Monitoring

Products

• CA Spectrum
• DX NetOps

Issue/Introduction

What is the best practice to configure Spectrum to monitor and poll ports for their status and alarm when the port goes down?  I have heard about using NetworkLinkType, Live Pipes, Ok_To_Poll, PollPorstatus and GeneratePortStatus Alarms but how should this be configured?  How can Spectrum automatically notify me when contact is lost on a port?

Environment

Release : 20.2.x

Component : SPCAEM - Events and Alarms

Resolution

The best practice for enabling Spectrum's port polling functionality is to create a Global Colleciton with the ports you want to monitor and then use Policy Manager to set the attributes needed for Spectrum to poll those ports:

1.  Create a Global Collection to search for ports using the NetworkLinkType attribute.  The NetworkLinkType attribute is a calculated attribute that is set when Spectrum determines what type of connection the interface has.  The attribute has the following values:

0x12a79     No Link                             0
0x12a79     Router Link                       1
0x12a79     Switch Link                       2
0x12a79     Shared Access Link         3
0x12a79     End Station Link               4
0x12a79     Wide Area Link                 5
0x12a79     Internal Link                      6
0x12a79     Unknown Link                   7
0x12a79     Network Cloud Link          8

You can set the Global Collection to use the NetworkLinkType that you need, however a general rule of thumb is to use Router Link and Switch link.

Be sure to set the GC Search to use Model Class Equal To Port - Do NOT use the Special Criteria for Interfaces of Devices.

The GC search criteria will look like this:

Model Class Equal To "Port" AND (NetworkLinkType Equal To "Switch Link" OR NetworkLinkType Equal To "Router Link")

 

 

After you have your Global Collection, select the Policy Manager model in the Explorer tab, click on the List view on the upper right and select the Paper icon to create a new policy:

Provide a Name for the policy and click the + icon under the associated rules:

Give the rule a name and add your Global Collection you created from above:

And Select the Live Pipes Policy and click ok:

(Change PollPortstatus to True if you want to later add ports to this policy that are not connected to anything in Spectrum).

 

Click Ok and you will see the policy:

Select the "Enable Policy on Creation" if you want the policy to be applied immediately.

You will then see your policy in the Policy Manager list:

Additional Information

 

When the network connectivity is changed, and a link is removed, Spectrum will update the NetworkLinkType attribute to be no link but the attributes will not change so the port will still be monitored.  If you do not want those ports to be monitored anymore, you would need to change the attributes back to no.  To have Spectrum do this automatically, you can create another Global Collection.  Name this one "Disable Port Monitoring".  Use this search criteria as a base - customize it as you need but at a minimum you need this:

 

In your Policy, add another rule that disables the Port Monitoring and apply it to the "Disabled Port Monitoring" GC:

When a connection is severed the first time this GC search runs it will put the model into the GC and apply the "Disable Monitoring" rule.  The next time the GC search runs it will remove it from the GC because it no longer meets the GC search criteria.