DCNM-SAN Event Management
DCNM Event Management tool (EMAN) offers event management capability directly in Cisco MDS, Nexus 7000 and 5000 series switches to monitor events and take informational or corrective action as events occur, or when a threshold is reached. EMAN captures the state of the switches during critical situations helping to take immediate recovery actions and gather information to perform root-cause analysis.
An event is generated when the object matches specified values or crosses specified thresholds. When it detects an event, EMAN will parse the event for the host name, severity and then determine the host-to-application dependency by comparing the event in the host table. EMAN monitors these events to detect the severity type such as warning, critical and emergency of the events. It will also list the impacted components such as a host, ISL or a storage port. Switch health and performance threshold are the two event types that the EMAN monitor.
Benefits of the Event Management Tool
EMAN tracks resource utilization and resource depletion by monitoring events in 45000 ports and 240 switches. It also provides a mechanism to send notifications whenever the specified threshold values are exceeded by any of the components. This notification helps network administrators diagnose resource utilization issues and prioritize resources making it more scalable.
EMAN helps in addressing component issues real time by performing the following functions:
DCNM-SAN Event Management
This section describes how DCNM handles asynchronous transfer events from the managed switches and contains the following topics:
Events
The following are the three primary methods by which DCNM detects events:
- SNMP—The Simple Network Management Protocol v1 (SNMPv1) event detector allows an event to be generated when the object matches specified values or crosses specified thresholds. The Cisco MDS 9000 switch can contain up to 10 trap destinations. The unmanaged fabrics or switches are removed from the list of traps destinations.
- Syslog—DCNM-SAN receives syslog messages and are logged in the events table in the database and archived on each switch.
- Fabric Model— DCNM-SAN can function even without receiving SNMP traps from the managed switches. DCNM-SAN polls for traps every 5 minutes and does a deeper discovery every 30 minutes by default.
Purpose
Asynchronous event handling serves the following purposes:
- Model Update—DCNM-SAN design the model of the physical and logical connectivity of each fabric. Asynchronous events enables real time synchronization with the fabric. In cases such as a linkdown, this model quickly updates the event without polling the fabric. However, for major changes such as an ISL link change, this model polls the fabric to synchronize.
- Log—All the events are logged into a database. The number of events that can be logged is set to 10,000 by default. You can view this log in the Cisco DCNM-SAN Client and in Cisco DCNM Web Client. The Cisco DCNM Web Client stores all events in the database unless you do not apply any filteres. The Cisco DCNM-SAN Client log is restricted to the fabric(s) that are opened in the client’s interface. TheCisco DCNM-SAN Client automatically updates the table as new events appear.
- Map—The Cisco DCNM-SAN Client’s updates the map automatically when topology changes.
Forwarding
Events are forwarded in three ways:
- Cisco Call Home—The Cisco MDS 9000 series switches generates an email at the event of a critical event such as a module down etc. You can customize this email to include additional information. You can use Cisco DCNM-SAN client to configure Cisco call home feature and it has no operational dependency on Cisco DCNM.
- EMC Call Home—If you enable this feature, the Cisco DCNM server generates an EMC call home email at the event of a critical event such as a linkDown event etc. This email is created in XML format.
- Event Forwarding—You can optionally choose to send an email or SNMP traps from Cisco DCNM for any or all events that are logged into the database.
DCNM-SAN Event Classification
Port Events
Port events provides real-time information about the operational status of the host ports, storage ports, ISLs, NPV etc in your network. At the event of a fault, the Cisco DCNM EMAN generates an event or events that are rolled up into an alert. The port events are broadly classified into two as follows:
Event Log Format
Events log consists of parseable information that is available to higher level management applications in the following format:
- Fabric/Switch—The name of the fabric or the switch.
- LocalTime—The date and time of the event occurred. The time is in the following format: hh:mm:ss.ttt. The date is in the following format: MM/DD/YYYY.
- Severity—Event severity level, combination of single events, or a range of event severity levels. The severity contains one of the following.
Port Up and Port Down
Model-generated events relating to Host, Storage, ISL, NP_Links
![]()
Note Port Moved events will not be logged.