Smart Monitoring and Alerting
Available Languages
Supported Hardware and Software
Smart Monitoring and Alerting (SMA) is a beta feature that helps monitor and detect important events or conditions in real-time. SMA provides notifications and help perform the required actions.
| Benefit |
Description |
| Unified Monitoring |
● Single feature that enables monitoring of all aspects of the switch.
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| Timely Detection |
● Real time continuous monitoring of data streams and system attributes for errors and anomalies in counters.
● Only port counters and protocol counters are monitored for unexpected patterns.
|
| Proactive Notification |
● Notifications or alerts are sent by SMA whenever an event of interest is detected.
● Alerts such as snmp-notification, system logs or OBFL logs.
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| Ease of Configuration |
● Easy to configure the SMA feature by using the building blocks such as the default policy or entity groups.
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| Maintain System Health |
● SMA helps in maintainin the system health by constantly monitoring the switch that enable in timely actions
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| History of Events |
● SMA maintains a history of events and aims to provide an overall system health report.
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| Customization of priorities and thresholds |
● SMA provides flexibility to set custom thresholds, priorities or conditions based on specific requirements.
● Define thresholds based on understanding of the system,
● Enables tailored monitoring and alerting such as configuring the monitoring for per port.
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The following image describes the architecture of SMA.
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SMA Architecture
Table 1. Building blocks of SMA
| Building Block |
Description |
Additional Informaiton |
| Policy |
Two types of policy are available.
● Default policy
● User-defined policy
|
Cloning of a policy is supported. Only one user-defined policy can exist at a time |
| Entity-Type |
Two types of entiies are supported
● Switch
● FC-port
|
|
| Entity-group |
Group of entity-type and filters, which are optional, form an entity group. Entity groups have priority based on the placement of the entity-group in the policy. When the same counter for certain entities is present in multiple entity-groups, then the configuration from the highest priority entity-group is applied. For an entity-type, the entity-groups at the top of policy have the highest priority with the priority decreasing we progress down the policy. |
Pre-defined entity-groups are available. Custom entity-groups can be created. |
| Monitor-level |
Defines the threshold values, sampling period for various threshold levels, warning, alarm and falling. |
Each counter has a default monitor-level Custom monitor levels are accepted. |
| Action-group |
Defines action and alerts for various threshold levels. An action-group is associated with a counter of the counter-group. A created action-group is re-used by the relevant counters or counter-groups multiple times in the same policy or across policies. |
Pre-defined action- groups are available Custom action-groups can be created. |
| Counter-group |
Defines a common behaviour for a set of counters. |
Pre-defined counter- groups are available Custom counter-groups can not be created. |
Supported Hardware and Software
Hardware
● Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 64-Gbps Fibre Channel Switches
● Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel Switches
● Cisco MDS 9396T 32-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switches
● Cisco MDS 9132T 32-Gbps 32-Port Fibre Channel Switches
● Cisco MDS 9148T 32-Gbps 48-Port Fibre Channel Switches
● Cisco MDS 9124V 64-Gbps 24-Port Fibre Channel Switches
● Cisco MDS 9148V 64-Gbps 48-Port Fibre Channel Switches
● Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switches
● Cisco MDS 9220i
● Cisco MDS 9000 24/10-Port SAN Extension Module for Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Directors
Software
Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Release 9.4(1)
● SMA active policy and PMON active policy cannot co-exists.
● SMA is not supported in NPV mode
● ISSU/D and high availability is not supported.
● Editing of active user-defined policy is not supported
● Implicit deactivation of a policy is not supported.
● Migration from PMON to SMA not supported.
● SMA to handle all alerts instead of LCSMA
● The global recovery-interval configuration is not supported.
o o The interval for DIRL is 60 seconds
o o The interval for congestion Isolation and congestion isolation recovery is 900 seconds
● FPM and FSM events are not displayed in SMA as FSM events and reason codes are available in PMON as the codes are resused.
Enabling SMA
1. Enter configuration mode: switch# configure terminal
2. Enable SMA switch(config)# no debug sma disable
Note: SMA is disabled by default.
Disabling SMA
1. Enter configuration mode:
switch# configure terminal
2. Disable SMA
switch(config)# debug sma disable
Creating or deleting entity group
1. Enter configuration mode: switch# configure terminal
2. Create an entity-group for using in the SMA policy.
switch(config)# [no] sma entity-group name <entity-group-name>
3. Add the entity-type to the entity-group.
switch(config-sma-entity-group)# [no] entity-type fc-port {all | core | edge | interface}
switch(config-sma-entity-group)# [no] entity-type switch {all | core | edge | interface}
Note: The following conditions are applicable:
◦ More than one filter can be added to the entity-type.
◦ Entity-type or sub-entity cannot be added or deleted when the entity-group is present in an active policy.
◦ The last filter cannot be deleted when the entity-group is part of an inactive policy.
Creating or deleting Action-group
1. Enter configuration mode: switch# configure terminal
2. Create an action-group for using in the SMA policy.
switch(config)# [no] sma action-group name <action-group-name> counter-group {cg-all | cg-congestion | cg-datarate | cg-fcport-all | cg-link-integrity | cg-protocol-all | cg-slowdrain }
switch(config)# [no] sma action-group name <action-group-name> counter {cg-all | cg-congestion | cg-datarate | cg-fcport-all | cg-link-integrity | cg-protocol-all | cg-slowdrain }
Adding or deleting actions to action-group
1. Enter configuration mode:
switch# configure terminal
2. Create an action-group to add actions to an action-group.
switch(config)# [no] sma action-group name <action-group-name> counter-group {cg-all | cg-congestion | cg-datarate | cg-fcport-all | cg-link-integrity | cg-protocol-all | cg-slowdrain }
3. Add the counter or counter-group specific actions and/or alerts to any of the threshold levels of an action-group.
switch(config-sma-entity-group)# [no] threshold-level {alarm | warning | falling} {actions <action-name> | alerts}
Note: The following conditions are applicable:
◦ Only one action and/or one or more alerts for each threshold-level in an action-group.
◦ For all counters, alarm threshold-level is mandatory and for many counters falling threshold-level is mandatory.
◦ Actions and alerts are editable if the action-group is part of an inactive policy.
◦ Actions and alerts are not editable if the action-group is part of an active policy.
Configuring the SMA Policy
1. Enter configuration mode:
switch# configure terminal
2. Configure the policy.
switch(config)# [no] sma policy name <policy_name>
3. Configure the entity-group
switch(config)# [no] entity-group name <entity-group-name> [{before|after} name <ref-entity-group-name>]
4. Configure the counter-group containing the monitor-levels, intervals and action groups.
switch(config)# [no] {counter <counter-name>|counter-group <countergrp-name>} monitor-level {default| period <period> alarm <alarm-threshold> [warning <warn-threshold>] falling <fall-threshold>} action-group {ag-default|ag-none|<action-group-name>}
Creating or deleting an user defined SMA Policy
1. Enter configuration mode:
switch# configure terminal
2. Create an user defined policy.
switch(config)# [no] sma policy name <policy_name>
Note: When the no form of the command is used, all the configuration details are to be provided.
Cloning or copying an user defined SMA Policy
1. Enter configuration mode:
switch# configure terminal
2. Copy an user defined SMA policy.
switch(config)# sma policy name copy default <policy_name>
Note: Ensure that the policy to be copied does not exist before copying.
Activating or deactivating SMA Policy
1. Enter configuration mode:
switch# configure terminal
2. Activate or deactivate SMA policy.
switch(config)# [no] sma policy activate name {default | <policy_name>}
Note: The following conditions are applicable:
◦ No active policy must exist in order to activate a policy.
◦ When the no form of the command is used, all the configuration details are to be provided.
◦ Policy must be active for the policy to be deactivated.
Viewing the Active Policy
Displays the active policy.
switch(config)# show sma policy active
View a policy with a given name
Displays the policy with the given name.
switch(config)# show sma policy name <policy-name>
View a action-group with a given name
Displays the action-group with the given name.
switch(config)# show sma action-group name <action-group-name>
View default and user-defined action-group
Displays the action-group of class as system or user. Class system refers to system-defined and user refers to user-defined.
switch(config)# show sma action-group class {system | user }
View an entity-group with a given name
Displays the entity-group with the given name.
switch(config)# show sma entity-group name <entity-group-name>
View the SMA History
Displays the SMA history. 1MB of memory is reserved for history and contains an average of 11,000 entries of threshold events.
switch(config)# show sma history
SMA default policy
SMA custom policy
Creating an entity-group for fc-port with filters edge and interface range
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