hostname appears in italic grey

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

I don't understand why in some views of the Nimsoft tree the hosts appear in italics and in gray?

We see no apparent difference at the functionality level, is it normal? What can this difference imply?

Environment

Component : UIM - UMP_USM

 

Cause

The  "Probe Reported Removal" attribute appears as true.

 

Resolution

Explanation about vmware grayed-out systems appearing:

In UIM we have a concept called 'device perspectives' which is a way of defining how we "know about" a device.

For example - the vmware probe may be monitoring a system, which is one "perspective" and then there also might be a robot on that system which is another "perspective".

The discovery_server takes various device perspectives and correlates them together into a single master record for a device, and during this process, keeps track of various "attributes" about these devices, such as their OS, serial number (where applicable), and other details about the device.
One such attribute which can exist on a device is an attribute "Deleted=yes" which means that one of the perspectives of the device has indicated that the device has been deleted from that perspective.

This is why the "Probe Reported Removal" appears as true.

This most commonly occurs in the context of vmware, and can occur when a device is migrated from one ESX server to another, for example, or if a device is deleted and then re-created with the same name/IP, and so on.

In the past, USM ignored this attribute since a device may have multiple perspectives and it shouldn't affect display of a device if only one such perspective had this attribute; in more recent versions of USM the functionality was introduced to "gray out" systems that had this attribute.
It turns out this had some unintended consequences, such as systems appearing duplicated in USM with one system "normal" and one system grayed out, or systems grayed out that were perfectly normal and healthy/available systems otherwise, etc.

If CM_COMPUTER_SYSTEM_ATTR table contains an entry deleted = true for any system, that system will display gray in USM.

The hot fix ump_usm_8.5.2-HF22 will stop displaying those grayed out systems.

Along with this fix, this patch contains some other performance improvements also.

The hot fix ump_usm_8.5.2-HF22 required two other dependency hotfixes mcs-8.5.8-HF12 and mcs_usm_patch-8.5.8-HF12.

 

Note: please, contact support for hotfixes availability.