Cisco Prime Infrastructure 3.1 User Guide

Creating Monitoring Policies and Thresholds

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Prime Infrastructure uses monitoring policies to monitor devices against the thresholds you specify. When the thresholds that you specify are reached, Prime Infrastructure issues an alarm. The alarms warn you of changing conditions before the issues impact operations.

By default, Prime Infrastructure polls:

• Device health metrics on supported routers, switches and hubs. Storage devices and UCS series devices are not monitored by the default health policy. See Modifying Default Monitoring Policies.
• Port group health metrics.
• Interface health metrics on WAN interface groups, AVC, UCS and Nexus-VPC.

Note Prime Infrastructure uses monitoring policies only for Wired devices.

You can also enable other Prime Infrastructure monitoring policies or create a custom MIB polling policy (see Monitoring Third-Party Devices By Polling MIBs).

Default Monitoring Policies

Prime Infrastructure polls SNMP objects to gather monitoring information for the following health monitoring policies under Monitor > Monitoring Tools > Monitoring Policies > Automonitoring :

• Device Parameters— Table 11-1 describes the device health parameters that are polled.
• Interface Parameters— Table 11-2 describes the interface parameters that are polled for:

– Trunk and Link Ports

– WAN Interfaces

For the following monitoring policies that provide assurance information, data is collected through NetFlow or NAMs:

• Application Response Time
• NAM Health
• Traffic Analysis
• Voice Video Data
• Voice Video Signaling

Creating New Monitoring Policies

Prime Infrastructure monitoring policies monitor network device metrics and alert you of changing conditions before the issues impact their operation.

To create a new monitoring policy, follow these steps:

Step 1 Choose Monitor > Monitoring Tools > Monitoring Policies > My Policies.

Step 2 Click Add.

Step 3 Select a monitoring policy from the Policy Types menu.

Step 4 Enter a name for the new policy.

Step 5 Under Parameters and Thresholds, specify the threshold values for which you want Prime Infrastructure to issue an alarm when they are reached.

Step 6 Click:

• Save and Activate to save and activate the policy immediately on the selected devices.
• Save and Close to save the policy and activate it at a later time.

Monitoring Third-Party Devices By Polling MIBs

You can design custom MIB polling policies to monitor third-party or Cisco devices and device groups. You can also create custom MIB policies to monitor device features for which Prime Infrastructure doesn’t provide default policies. Using this feature, you can:

• Upload the SNMP MIB for the device type, then choose devices and attributes to poll and the polling frequency.
• Upload a single MIB definition file or a group of MIBs with their dependencies as a ZIP file.

Note Ensure that you upload all the dependencies of the MIB, before uploading the MIB. You can also upload the MIB along with it's dependencies in a ZIP file.

• Display the results as a line chart or a table.

This feature allows you to easily repeat polling for the same devices and attributes and customize the way Cisco devices are polled using SNMP.

You can create a maximum of 25 custom MIB polling policies. There is no limitation in the number of MIB files uploaded.

To create custom MIB polling policies, follow these steps:

Step 1 Choose Monitor > Monitoring Tools > Monitoring Policies > My Policies, then click Add.

Step 2 From the Policy Types menu, select Custom MIB Polling.

Step 3 Enter a name for the policy.

Step 4 Under the MIB Selection tab, specify the polling frequency and enter the MIB information.

• If Prime Infrastructure doesn’t have the specific MIB you want to monitor, download the MIBs you want to monitor from the following URL: http://tools.cisco.com/Support/SNMP/do/BrowseMIB.do?local=en&step=2
• To upload a MIB, specify a filename extension only if you are uploading a ZIP file.

Regardless of the device, the extensions.ZIP,.MIB and.MY are allowed.

• If you are uploading a ZIP file, ensure that all dependent MIB files are either included in the ZIP or already present in the system.
• Ensure your upload file and the MIB definition have the same name (for example: Do not rename the ARUBA-MGMT-MIB definition file to ARUBA_MGMT). If you are uploading a ZIP file, you may name it as you please, but the MIB files packaged inside it must also follow this convention (for example: MyMibs.zip is acceptable, as long as all MIB files in the ZIP match their MIB names).

Step 5 To test the policy you created on a device before activating it, click the Test tab and select a device on which to test the new policy.

Step 6 Click Save and Activate to immediately activate the policy on the devices specified.

Step 7 To view the MIB polling data, create a generic dashlet (see Creating Generic Dashlets) using the name of the policy that you created.

To view the SNMP polling date for ASR devices, you should use the show platform hardware qfp active datapath utilization | inc Processing command for CPU utilization and show platform hardware qfp active infrastructure exmem statistics | sec DRAM command for memory utilization.