Checking for unmanaged interfaces

Use SQL queries to check that devices marked as permanently unmanaged are really meant to be marked as permanently unmanaged.

About this task

During discovery, the PopulateDNCIM_ManagedStatus discovery stitcher is used to mark specific interfaces as permanently unmanaged for the purposes of monitoring. This means that the specified interface types are not polled by Network Manager. Interfaces are set to permanently unmanaged on an interface type basis, based on the value of various interface attributes, including the ifDescr attribute. You can check which types of interfaces are marked permanently unmanaged by default and you can change the settings if necessary. By default, interfaces which are virtual or dial up are marked permanently unmanaged, because it costs money to poll these interfaces.

In addition to being marked unmanaged, any events generated on these interfaces will be tagged so that they can be filtered out of event lists by network operators.

Procedure

Use the following SQL command to retrieve a list of interfaces that have been marked as permanently unmanaged by the discovery.

SELECT     mnode.entityName AS DeviceName, 
           i.entityName AS Interface, 
           i.ipAddress AS IPAddress, 
           i.ifDescr AS ifDescr,  
           m.status AS Status
FROM       ncim.interfaces i
INNER JOIN ncim.entity mnode on mnode.entityId = i.mainNodeEntityId
INNER JOIN ncim.managedStatus m on m.entityId = i.entityId and m.status = 2;

Check each IP address returned by the query and note any IP addresses that you want to be able to poll and monitor.
Let's assume that the results of the query show a number of interfaces that need to be monitored. Let's also assume that each of these IP addresses has the text Vlan in their ifDescr MIB variable, and you want to monitor them.
Edit the $NCHOME/precision/disco/stitchers/DNCIM/PopulateDNCIM_ManagedStatus.stch file.
Remove the VLAN interface type from the filter at the end of the file.
To do this you must remove the following two lines from the filter:
```
OR
ExtraInfo->m_IfDescr like 'Vlan'
```
Save the file.

Results

You have now checked for unmanaged interfaces. You noted that VLAN interfaces had been set to permanently unmanaged. This was not a desired setting, and so you modified the settings in the PopulateDNCIM_ManagedStatus.stch stitcher file so that VLAN interfaces are discovered as managed interfaces.

You have performed a number of topology checks. You can perform more topology checks by running other discovery troubleshooting reports.

Assuming that you are now satisfied with the changes that you have made to the discovery configuration, you can run another discovery to check the results of your changes.