options for blocking alarms during server maintenance

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)
• CA Unified Infrastructure Management On-Premise (Nimsoft / UIM)
• CA Unified Infrastructure Management SaaS (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

What are the options in DX UIM for blocking or suspending alarms from devices that are undergoing maintenance?

Environment

• DX UIM: 20.4 or 23.4

Cause

• Guidance on maintenance options

Resolution

There are two kinds of maintenance mode in UIM - one of them is "robot based" which is accessed from IM and this is considered somewhat of a "legacy" maintenance mode.  It only works on robots which are up and running, as it sends a callback to the robot itself to place it in maintenance mode and another one to remove it from maintenance mode.

To access this mode, highlight the hub the robot belongs to in the left side of the Tree View in Infrastructure Manager and then right-click on the robot in the right-hand pane and select "Set Maintenance Mode Until...."

This mode puts the robot and probes into a suspended state until the specified time (or until you select "Leave Maintenance Now").  Alarms and QoS will not be generated.

There are some drawbacks - for example, alarms from an external monitoring probe like net_connect which are pointed at this robot will still be sent, and setting this mode on a hub will disable the hub probe and knock the hub offline until maintenance completes.

The "newer" way to use maintenance mode is through Operator Console. The way it works is you put the device in Operator Console into Maintenance Mode (or you can also do maintenance scheduling by group) and this blocks the alarms from that device at the NAS probe level so it can work on robots which are down.

This is documented here:

Manage the Groups Maintenance Window

Another option is to use a NAS pre-processor rule to exclude the messages.  We recommend this only as a last resort because it can be difficult to manage.

Example:

• Type: exclude
  • robotname can be a pipe-separated list like robot1|robot2|robot3|robot4
  • select all severities except Clear

The example above will block all messages from the specified robots. Just make sure to remove or disable the rule when maintenance is complete!