Smarts NPM: OSPF not alarming due to device dropping table instance instead of changing to 'Down'

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:


We are not able to monitor, via SNMP, the OPSF neighbor state when it's down.
Alarms for the OSPF sessions which are setup via a VPLS backbone did not create any alarms in the systems.

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - SMARTS

Cause

The OID ospfNbrState is a polled object, it reports the state of the neighbor at the time of polling. When you shut down a link on the router, the neighbor on it goes down immediately. If the neighbors transition between states is reasonably fast, polling will not "catch" the change in state.  This table is basically SNMP analog of 'sh ip ospf neighbor' output, when the neighbor goes down, sh ip ospf neighbor will no longer have output for that neighbor.
It is by design that that the status is not kept forever in a Down state and will remove from ospfNbr table

Resolution

This option is only available from Network Protocol Manger 9.2.x and above.
There is a configurable flag called EnableAlertsOnDynamicOSPFLinks.  

To use it follow these steps:

• Navigate to <installed base>smarts/bin/ and use sm_edit to edit this file:
  • <BASEDIR>/NPM/smarts/conf/ospf/ospf.conf.
• Set "EnableAlertsOnDynamicOSPF"  to true.
• Restart your NPM domain