Monitor robot availability / reachability and send alarms with DX UIM

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

We want to monitor the Availability and / or Rechability of servers / robots / hosts / devices in my DX UIM Environment. 

What options do we have? 

How can we send Availability alarms and create reports? 

Environment

DX UIM 20.4.* / 23.4.* 

Cause

Guidance

Resolution

Below are different options and concepts for Availability Monitoring: 

• DX UIM Availability (via QOS_POWER_STATE)
  Note that QOS_POWER_STATE data is collected for hubs/robots by default and should not be changed/disabled.
  QOS_POWER_STATE is a QOS sent by the robot to help you to generate reports and its used for availability calculation.
  hub Metrics (broadcom.com)
  Runs every 5 minutes and values are collected as 0's and 1's.
  Default values are 0 for down and 1 for Up.
  
  
• Availability Reports (broadcom.com)
  This is the out of the box Availabily Report documentation. This article describes the CA Business Intelligence (CABI) Availability reports. (It requires ICMP)
  
  
• net_connect and icmp can send alarms based on the monitoring results. 
  Monitor up/down status using both ICMP (port 0) pings as well as handshaking specific service ports, e.g., NimBUS port 48000 (controller) and 48001(Spooler) for robot and 48002 for hub.
  
  
• Snmpcollector can also be configured to send alarms  
  
  • How are Reachability and Availability in snmpcollector calculated? (broadcom.com)
  • What QOS types will show in an availability report in UIM? (broadcom.com)

• • Availability is the percentage of time that the device is powered on and is also capable of processing data. A device that is 'Available' might still be unreachable because of a network or communications failure by another device.
  • Reachability refers to whether a device is reachable from the source. Typically, data sources use ICMP (ping testing) to communicate regularly with the target device. Any communication failures, including the loss of the network path or routing, affect the reachability statistics. If ICMP is blocked, and you cant use the net_connect probe to ping the device, you can use the snmpcollector probe determine reachability.
    Reachability data comes from regular ping testing of all devices that support ICMP. A reachability value can be the percentage ping responses that are received from the device during each reporting interval. You can use net_connect or icmp for ping monitoring.
    
    
• Community Post: (unsupported, custom scripts/callbacks)
  robots_checker
  UIM robots_checker (check probes, and do callbacks on it). This probe has been created to do self-monitoring of UIM Hubs and robots.
  https://github.com/UIM-Community/robots_checker