CiscoPingMibMonitor

This monitor spends a lot of time sleeping while it waits for the remote IOS device to complete the requested ping operations. The monitor is pessimistic in calculating the delay between creation of the ciscoPingTable entry and its first attempt to retrieve the results of that entry’s ping operations — it will always wait at least (packet-count * (packet-timeout + packet-delay)) milliseconds before even checking whether the remote pings have completed. Therefore, it is prone to hogging poller threads if used with large values for the packet-count, packet-timeout, and/or packet-delay parameters. Keep these values as small as practical to avoid tying up poller threads unnecessarily.

This monitor always uses the current time in whole seconds since the UNIX epoch as the instance identifier of the ciscoPingTable entries that it creates. The object that holds this identifier is a signed 32-bit integer type, precluding a finer resolution. It’s a good idea to mix in the least-significant byte of the millisecond-accurate time as a substitute for that of the whole-second-accurate value to avoid collisions. IOS seems to clean up entries in this table within minutes after their ping operations have completed.

This monitor implements the Common Configuration Parameters.

A service provider’s client, Foo Corporation, has network service at multiple locations. At each Foo location, a point-of-sale system is statically configured at IPv4 address 192.168.255.1. Foo wants to be notified any time a point-of-sale system becomes unreachable. Using an Horizon remote location monitor is not feasible.

All of Foo Corporation’s CPE routers must be Cisco IOS devices to achieve full coverage in this scenario.

One approach to this requirement is to configure all of Foo Corporation’s premise routers to be in the surveillance categories Customer_Foo, CPE, and Routers, and to use a filter to create a poller package that applies only to those routers.

We will use the special value ${ipaddr} for the proxy-ip-addr parameter so that the remote pings will be provisioned on each Foo CPE router. Since we want each Foo CPE router to ping the same IP address, 192.168.255.1, we statically list that value for the target-ip-addr address.

A service provider’s client, Bar Limited, has network service at multiple locations. While Horizon’s service assurance is generally sufficient, Bar also wants to be notified any time a premise router at one of their locations is unreachable from the perspective of an IOS device in Bar’s main data center. Some or all of the Bar Limited CPE routers may be non-Cisco devices in this scenario.

To meet this requirement, our approach is to configure Bar Limited’s premise routers to be in the surveillance categories Customer_Bar, CPE, and Routers, and to use a filter to create a poller package that applies only to those routers.

In this case, we use the special value ${ipaddr} not in the proxy-ip-addr parameter but in the target-ip-addr parameter so that the remote pings will be performed for each Bar CPE router. Since we want the same IOS device 20.11.5.11 to ping the CPE routers, we statically list that value for the proxy-ip-addr address. Example poller-configuration.xml additions: