Call Home in UCS Overview
Call Home provides an email-based notification for critical system policies. A range of message formats are available for compatibility with pager services or XML-based automated parsing applications. You can use this feature to page a network support engineer, email a Network Operations Center, or use Cisco Smart Call Home services to generate a case with the Technical Assistance Center.
Important |
Call Home does not use a secure protocol. It is disabled by default. |
The Call Home feature can deliver alert messages containing information about diagnostics and environmental faults and events.
The Call Home feature can deliver alerts to multiple recipients, referred to as Call Home destination profiles. Each profile includes configurable message formats and content categories. A predefined destination profile is provided for sending alerts to the Cisco TAC, but you also can define your own destination profiles.
When you configure Call Home to send messages, Cisco UCS Manager executes the appropriate CLI show command and attaches the command output to the message.
Cisco UCS delivers Call Home messages in the following formats:
-
Short text format which provides a one or two line description of the fault that is suitable for pagers or printed reports.
-
Full text format which provides fully formatted message with detailed information that is suitable for human reading.
-
XML machine-readable format that uses Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Adaptive Messaging Language (AML) XML Schema Definition (XSD). The AML XSD is published on the Cisco.com website. The XML format enables communication with the Cisco Systems Technical Assistance Center.
For information about the faults that can trigger Call Home email alerts, see the Cisco UCS Faults and Error Messages Reference.
The following figure shows the flow of events after a Cisco UCS fault is triggered in a system with Call Home configured:
Important |
Call Home is configured as Off by default. It is a non-secure feature, and must be explicitly enabled. |
Call Home Considerations and Guidelines
How you configure Call Home depends on how you intend to use the feature. The information you need to consider before you configure Call Home includes the following:
Destination Profile
You must configure at least one destination profile. The destination profile or profiles that you use depends upon whether the receiving entity is a pager, email, or automated service such as Cisco Smart Call Home.
If the destination profile uses email message delivery, you must specify a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server when you configure Call Home.
Contact Information
The contact email, phone, and street address information should be configured so that the receiver can determine the origin of messages received from the Cisco UCS domain.
Cisco Smart Call Home sends the registration email to this email address after you send a system inventory to begin the registration process.
If an email address includes special characters, such as # (hash), spaces, or & (ampersand), the email server might not be able to deliver email messages to that address. Cisco recommends that you use email addresses which comply with RFC2821 and RFC2822 and include only 7bit ASCII characters.
IP Connectivity to Email Server or HTTP Server
The fabric interconnect must have IP connectivity to an email server or the destination HTTP server. In a cluster configuration, both fabric interconnects must have IP connectivity. This connectivity ensures that the current, active fabric interconnect can send Call Home email messages. The source of these email messages is always the IP address of a fabric interconnect. The virtual IP address assigned to Cisco UCS Manager in a cluster configuration is never the source of the email.
Smart Call Home
If Cisco Smart Call Home is used, the following are required:
-
An active service contract must cover the device being configured.
-
The customer ID associated with the Smart Call Home configuration in Cisco UCS must be the CCO (Cisco.com) account name associated with a support contract that includes Smart Call Home.
Cisco UCS Faults and Call Home Severity Levels
Because Call Home is present across several Cisco product lines, Call Home has its own standardized severity levels. The following table describes how the underlying Cisco UCS fault levels map to the Call Home severity levels. You need to understand this mapping when you configure the Level setting for Call Home profiles.
Call Home Severity |
Cisco UCS Fault |
Call Home Meaning |
---|---|---|
(9) Catastrophic |
N/A |
Network-wide catastrophic failure. |
(8) Disaster |
N/A |
Significant network impact. |
(7) Fatal |
N/A |
System is unusable. |
(6) Critical |
Critical |
Critical conditions, immediate attention needed. |
(5) Major |
Major |
Major conditions. |
(4) Minor |
Minor |
Minor conditions. |
(3) Warning |
Warning |
Warning conditions. |
(2) Notification |
Info |
Basic notifications and informational messages. Possibly independently insignificant. |
(1) Normal |
Clear |
Normal event, signifying a return to normal state. |
(0) debug |
N/A |
Debugging messages. |