Reachability and Availability for Interfaces in Performance Management

Products

• CA Infrastructure Management
• CA Performance Management - Usage and Administration
• DX NetOps

Issue/Introduction

How to configure an Interface report against Reachability and Availability.

Why is Availability, but not Reachability, available against the Interface Metric Family as a Metric option?

How does Performance Management determine Reachability by Component in Views set to "Calculate by: Component"?

Is there a way to report on interface uptime?

Environment

All supported DX NetOps Performance Management (PM) Performance Center (PC) releases

Cause

Reachability is not collected at the component item level.

Availability is collected for Device level items, and Interface component items only.

Resolution

Performance Management views, gathers and implements Reachability and Availability differently than the old eHealth product.

• There is no real Reachability or Availability for individual component items, whether an Interface or other types.
• There is an Availability metric available for Interface component items from the Interface Metric Family. It doesn't gather real Availability as represented by sysUpTime at the device level. It simply records the ifOperStatus setting for the Interface at each poll cycle.  We can see this as an example from the Availability Metric expression found in the High Speed Interface Vendor Certification. We see it uses:
  • (ifOperStatus == 1) ? 100 : 0
• For Availability against a large group of Interfaces, if for example there are 10+ items in a graph all showing 100%, only one color and a single trend line will appear on the chart. To see per item numbers we'd need to use a CSV export of the View to see the individual values per item.
• We can also use Multi-View Trend Views configured for "Metric Calculate Level: by Component" for the Reachability Metric against a Group with Devices as members. That will show Reachability per Component Item for the Devices in the target Group. Be aware that this represents the same Reachability value per component item that we'd see against the parent device.