In Maintenance with SMARTS

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Posted on 8th July 2011 by admin in Coding |EMC SMARTS

An client I’m doing some alarm reduction work for has started putting more and more network connections and devices into “In Maintenance” in SMARTS.

This would be of no concern if they were running off a single set of SAMs and APMs. But being the owners of a large global enterprise network and in the banking sector one isn’t enough and rightly so. They have two independent systems both doing live polling and alerting, backing each other up.

We’ve had a tool in place for a while, ensuring that any log entries, ownership and acknowledgement are replicated from one system to the other.

Today I finished the first cut of a Perl script that replicates In Maintenance setting between the systems via the SMARTS API. Just a bit of change control and everything will be in place.

If for whatever reason the Network Operations Centre have to switch from one system to the other all of the maintenance settings will then be in place allowing them to continue as if nothing had happened.

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How good’s your glue?

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Posted on 24th June 2011 by admin in Coding

If you’re working in the Network Management space as I am you’ll no doubt be taking in feeds from third party systems, parsing the data so that it can read into an application or used in some way to manipulate data already there.

It’s the “glue” that allows many systems to share data. If no API exists the only alternative is often an XML or CSV file exchange via the most secure protocol both systems support.

But can you trust the content of the feed? It’s a good idea to use regular expressions to audit each field in the data before it’s used, ensuring bad data gets ignored. But how *old* is the data? Does the method used to generate or exchange the data ever cause an old file to be handed over?
How would you know about it?

Having the third party add a simple line like

# EOF 07/07/2011 21:02:37

to a CSV file, or the equivalent XML tag can save you a mass of time wondering why changes to one system are not being reflected in another.

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