Monitoring Your Network - Monitoring Alarms - Interpreting Alarm-Instance Information -
Previous: Using the NerveCenter Client     Next: Getting Information about an Alarm

Interpreting Alarm-Instance Information

The alarm-instance information that you can view using the NerveCenter Web Client and the NerveCenter Client is meant to stand on its own, that is, to provide you with all the information you need concerning a network condition. However, until you become familiar with all of the behavior models being used at your site, you might need some supplementary information. For example, suppose you see the following summary information:

Summary Alarm Information

It's clear what node is being reported on. However, if you're not familiar with the Authentication alarm, it may not be clear what it means for an instance of this alarm to be in the state Alert3. (As it turns out, this state indicates that a node has received three authentication-failure traps within a ten-minute period.) To find out what this state means, you can use the NerveCenter Client to look at the documentation for, and definition of, this alarm. For information on this subject, see the section Getting Information about an Alarm.

Also, it may not always be clear what condition caused the Source to generate the trigger that led to the most recent alarm transition. In the figure above, a mask called AuthFail generated the trigger authFail. You can probably guess that a trap mask responded to an authentication-failure trap. But what if you were monitoring an instance of the alarm ifErrorStatus (which monitors the percentage of error packets on an interface) and the poll MediumErrorRate fired the trigger mediumErrorRate. You could infer that NerveCenter had seen a moderate number of error packets on an interface, but what constitutes a medium error rate? You can find out by using the NerveCenter Client to read the documentation for, or definition of, the MediumErrorRate poll. For further information on interpreting the meaning of a trigger, see the section Getting Information about a Trigger.