Where are the alarms stored in DX UIM?

Products

DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

Where are the alarms stored in DX UIM? Where are the alarms that show in the Operator Console alarm viewer and IM actually stored?

What would be some basic queries to extract NAS alarms from the DB?

Environment

DX UIM 20.x.x / 23.4.*

Cause

Guidance

Resolution

Summary

nas_alarms table contains only active alarms. All alarms in this table are visible in IM and the Operator Console (OC).
nas_transaction_summary contains all active and closed alarms and this table contains a single record for each alarm
nas_transaction_log contains the events for each alarm. It has multiple rows for each alarm based on the number of times each alarm occurs
To display alarms in OC we depend on the above 3 tables
To display alarms in IM, we depend on the local database.db (open 'LIVE' alarms) and transactionlog.db (historical alarms) which nas maintains locally

Below is a list of all of the NAS tables:

NAS_VERSION
NAS_ALARMS
NAS_TRANSACTION_SUMMARY
NAS_TRANSACTION_LOG
NAS_NOTES
NAS_ALARM_NOTE

Infrastructure Manager (IM) Alarm subconsole:

The alarms that show in IM are stored in 2 SQLlite db files named database.db and transactionlog.db located in the nas folder \Nimsoft\probes\service\nas.

The database.db contains all of the active (LIVE) alarms (All alarms that are open and visible in the IM alarm subconsole)
The transactionlog.db contains the alarm transaction history and transaction log of open and closed (acknowledged) alarms.

NAS_ALARMS

Stores all open alarms.

NAS_TRANSACTION_SUMMARY

Stores a unique entry (identifier: nimid) for all alarms (open and closed). When an alarm is acknowledged it is removed from the NAS_ALARMS table and at the same time the "closed" field of the NAS_TRANSACTION_SUMMARY populates with the date and time the alarm was acknowledged.

NAS_TRANSACTION_LOG

Stores every single occurrence of the same alarm (same nimid).

Operator Console alarm viewer (UIM 20.3 and later)

The alarms showing in the OC alarm viewer are retrieved from the UIM DB. The nas nis-bridge, (enabled by default), generates an exact replica of the tables contained in the database.db and the transactionlog.db.
The NiS bridge keeps the SQLite database alarm tables in sync with the UIM DB alarm tables, bi-directionally.
The UIM DB contains the same alarm tables contained in the database.db and transactionlog.db.
Although all tables are kept in sync, the nas_transaction_log and nas_transaction_summary in the 2 databases might contain a different amount of entries.

This is because the transaction logging and compression configuration (e.g., how long the transaction history is stored) for the 2 databases are managed separately: The Transaction Log Tab and in nis-bridge TAB.

The IM and the OC should show the same amount of open alarms, meaning that the 2 NAS_ALARMS tables in both databases should be in sync.

If they are not in sync, check: Alarms are not 'in sync' between OC and Infrastructure Manager (IM) (broadcom.com)

Additional Information

Basic Select Queries to pull out alarms from the DX UIM DB:

-- Select all open alarms:

Select * from NAS_ALARMS

-- Select all Open and Closed alarms (this includes all alarms, closed and open alarms)

select * from NAS_TRANSACTION_SUMMARY

--Select all Open CDM Alarms:

select * from NAS_ALARMS where prid = 'cdm'

--Select all Open CDM Alarms, show the most recent occurrence that arrived first

select * from NAS_ALARMS where prid = 'cdm' order by time_arrival DESC

--Select all Open and closed CDM Alarms, show most recent first:

select * from NAS_TRANSACTION_SUMMARY where prid = 'cdm' order by closed DESC

-- If you'd like to look for some CDM alarms for a particular server you can add the source:

select * from NAS_ALARMS where prid = 'cdm'
AND source = '<name_of_the_server>'