The NHM Instant PDF Status Report

Transcript

An easy way to get more details about your network is to get an instant PDF status report. The status report provides additional information. When you request a new report, you will see a dialog. Some information has been retained from the last report, like company name and second line of text or location or anything else. The IP to use to view report field is used if you are viewing from outside the plant and need to use an intermediate server to get to IntraVUE.

You can enter the IP address of that intermediate server under the IP to use view report field. By default, we use the last five hours for some data in the report, currently the period analyzed for NHM incidents. You can either enter the number of hours, or you can enter a specific time period you would like to cover. There's also a place where you can add comments, which will appear at the start of the report.

So I'm going to click OK. And the report was generated very quickly and opens in a new tab. The status report provides general information in the header. You will see the name and second line that was entered in the request dialog, as well as any comment. There is a summary of devices and switches by network, showing critical and non-critical counts, as well as their network connection statuses. Then there's a 24-hour uptime summary, showing the uptime of the worst or single most disconnected of the always-on critical devices in each network.

This is followed by some host information on what NICs are present and what their net masks are. Next is a high-level network health status. There will be lines that start with good, bad, warning, or note for each metric that the Network Health Monitor checks. Looking at the simulator and local networks, there are no critical devices over limit and no disconnected always-on devices. The wireless network is bad because there are four disconnected always-on devices.

Next is a summary of any warnings or observations that were made in the following network sections. Anything that is not good will show up on this page, as well as in the details. If everything is good on this page and the previous page, the networks monitored by IntraVUE are healthy. So following this, there's a section for each configured network. There's a list of configured scan ranges, summary of connections and verification states of the devices in this network with a comment that may be a warning or not.

There's also a summary of critical device states broken down by switches and devices. Generally speaking, we don't like to see any unknown devices or switches. Next is a section on total Network Health Monitor incidents, NHM incidents exceeding normal. This is going to give a list of the times in one minute the total number of critical devices exceeding their limits were more than 20 or 30% of the critical devices in that network.

The 20 or 30% depends on the size of the network. This is an important part of network health monitoring. The times that in one minute the total number of critical devices exceeding their limits is a major indicator of network health. The Network Health Monitor will send an email alarm when the last three or five minutes are over this value. If there were any times total incidents exceed the limit, those times would be reported in one of the three sections, ping, transmit, or receive.

Next is a list of any cloaked devices in the network. The time of discovery and the time of last connection event are provided. Then there's a section on configuration, non-network issues, and it checks a number of things like the number of devices without names, no connected devices under unresolved node, if there are any nodes between switches, looking for SNMP issues, too many devices in the unknown state, and finally, network-related issues. So it's checking things like disconnected critical always-on devices, device moves in the last 24 hours.

Were any IP or MAC address changes? Was there a broadcast storm in which 20% of the devices go over their limits? That is a video review of the instant PDF status report, an important tool for the IntraVUE user and support personnel.