Smarts SAM Alcatel 5620 Adapter: How do I stop an Alcatel alarm from arriving into the Smarts SAM Alcatel 5620 Adapter?

Products

• VMware

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - SMARTS

Resolution

How do I stop an Alcatel alarm from arriving into the Smarts SAM Alcatel 5620 Adapter?



Alcatel Alarms that arrive into the Smarts SAM Alcatel 5620 Adapter are generated from the Alcatel device in the following form:

alarm-<alarmName>-<alarmType>-<alarmProbableCause> (the numbers populated by the fm.AlarmObject in Alcatel)

These alarms are then matched using the ASA-Alarm.conf file. If the alarm is not defined in the ASA-Alarm.conf file, it will take the default values given at the start of this file:

DEDUP DEFAULT OFF

SEVERITY DEFAULT 7

EXPIRATION DEFAULT 1296000

NOTARGET 1296000

So a notification will be created with these values. This gives the default SEVERITY and so on for the alarm, which is translated in the ASA-Alarm.conf.

The alarms which are sent from the EMS are called Raw alarms. These alarms are not generated by the Smarts domain managers but are posted by the ASAM adapter to the OI. Hence, these alarms do not have any root cause correlation. The easy way to identify these events is to look at the "Source" of the event. These events will have ASAM adapter as the source. The Alcatel EMS has information specifying the object on which this particular alarm occurred. Using this information the adapter would determine which class to populate. Below is the example of the poller alarm.

Regarding the alarm names, the ems alarm is of the form alarm-31-4-24. Where first number specifies the alarm name, second specifies the alarm type and third specifies the alarm cause. The 1.2 adapter maintains the mapping of these numbers to text. These number to text mapping can be found in the Alcatel 5620 EMS Trouble shooting Guide. The alarm alarm-32-4-24 will have Event: PollerProblem Type: communicationsAlarm, Probable Cause: resyncFailed

The adapter makes use of the "<affectedObjectClassName>netw.NetworkElement</affectedObjectClassName>" to determine the class. Here netw.NetworkElement specifies that the class is Router.

In order to remove an alarm from the notification list, you would have to find the alarm numbers for that specific alarm and create an entry to de-activate it similar to the following:

INACTIVE alarm-abc-def-ghi

Where "abc" is the alarm name, "def" is the alarm type and "ghi" is the alarm probable cause numbers defined on the Alcatel side.

Making the alarm INACTIVE will prevent the adapter from posting these alarm to the OI. There are some alarms which are handled in a special way. A specific example is alarm-243 (SnmpReachabilityAlarm). When this alarm is received, the adapter will set the status of the interfaces to UNKNOWN, SNMP agent status to UNREACHABLE and IP status to TIMEDOUT. This will make the IPAM server to generate a Router Down event. If the alarm-243 is filtered out by making it INACTIVE, then the raw alarm will not be posted to OI. But the Router Down alarm will still be generated by the IPAM. If a router is having poller problem, it is most likely have a SnmpReachabilityAlarm. The poller problem alarm-31 is NOT handled is a special way. So if this is marked INACTIVE, then this alarm will not be posted on OI.

More information can be found in the Alcatel 5620 SAM Adapter "Installation and User's Guide" available on Powerlink.