Extreme Networks EPICenter 5.0, Manual

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Tuning the Alarm System
EPICenter Concepts and Solutions Guide 121
3 Uncheck the Enabled checkbox to disable the alarm, then click OK .
Note that disabling alarms that are not likely to occur will not have much performance impact. For
example, if you do not use ESRP, the disabling the ESRP State Change alarm is not likely to have an
impact, as those alarms should never occur. However, if you do use ESRP but do not want to know
about state changes, disabling that alarm could have some performance impact.
One way to determine which alarms could be disabled for maximum performance impact is to look at
the alarms that actually do occur within your network. You can use the Alarm Log Browser to show
you which alarms occur in your network:
1 In the Alarm Log Browser, filter the alarm list to show all alarms. You can filter the log using
“Log ID > 0”
as the filter criterion to show all alarm log entries.
2 Sort the alarm list by the Name column. This groups all occurrences of a given alarm together. Using
this list you can see both which alarms occur in your network, and the volume of alarms generated
for each type of event.
3 If this list shows large number of alarm instances for an alarm that you don’t care about, disabling
that alarm could potentially have a beneficial impact on EPICenter system performance.
Another possibility is that a specific device is generating a large number of alarms. If this is the case,
you may be able to eliminate some of this load by either reconfiguring, maintaining or repairing the
device to eliminate the fault, or by changing the scope of one or more alarms to remove the problematic
device from the alarm scope. By removing a device from the alarm scope, EPICenter will ignore traps
for the device, and will not trigger an alarm even though the device itself may still generate those trap
events.
Limiting the Scope of Alarms
One way to potentially reduce the load created by alarm processing is to use the Alarm scope to limit
an Alarm to only selected devices. For example, you may want to create link down and link up alarms
to monitor the status of certain critical links in your network, but ignore such events on non-critical
links.
When you create an alarm, the default scope is to all devices and all ports. The Scope tab of the Add
Alarm Definition or Modify Alarm Definition dialogs lets you specify a scope for the alarm (Figure 52).