Monitoring of switch stack units with Zabbix

[PS2201]

Dear all,

I have a problem monitoring 3com stack switches with Zabbix. The baseline is, I have a master switch with one IP address and attached to it five stack units with no IP addresses.

I am able to monitor most of the components via the OID's without any issues. But how will I be able to monitor the availability/reachability of the stack unit without the IP?

Anyone who can help? Would be great if you help me to find a solution for this!

Cheers,
Patrick

[troffasky]

If it doesn't have an IP address, then you're not going to be able to monitor it with Zabbix. However, perhaps if you snmpwalk the master unit, you may find an OID that indicates the status of the stack members from the master's point of view.

How does the master connect to the stack units? Is it through a matrix port [sorry, I've only ever seen vintage 3Coms] or through an ordinary ethernet port? If it's just ethernet, you could monitor the ifOperStatus of the relevant ports.

[PS2201]

Hi troffasky,

thank you for your reply. The switches are connected via cascade connection. I have tried monitoring the OID's, but everytime I unplug the stack switch which does not have the IP, no status of the OID's can be retrieved... :-(

Any other idea?

Thank you very much for your help in advance.

Cheers,
Patrick

[Kerrygeek]

If you do snmpwalk on the master switch (the one with the IP address) can you get information from the other switches? I've never tried it, just a guess.

Kerry

[PS2201]

Yes, you can get the information via snmpwalk in the masterswitch. The problem is, I cannot monitor the reachability/availability via OID it seems (or maybe someone knows the OID for the stack units?), so when I unplug the switch, I do not have any value which I can trigger an alert with... because all latest data is gone! The switch information disappears from the zabbix screen completely.

Most likely you were correct yesterday... without IP's it will not work :-(

[Kerrygeek]

Ok, you can't check to make sure one of the slave switches is up by pinging it because it doesn't have an IP address. If you can do snmpwalk on the master switch and see parameters from the slave switches, maybe you can watch for something to change when the slave switch goes down. You'll have to define "goes down", does it mean totally loses power? Or maybe you can monitor 2 or 3 ports and if they are all down you can assume the switch is down? I don't know what OIDs you have from the master switch so it might take a little ingenuity to come up with a combination that gives you the information you're looking for.

If you're looking for this I assume you've had some kind of problem with one of the slave switches, what problem have you had or what failure mode do you expect from the slave switch? Can you just ping the master and assume if it's down the slaves will be down too? Do you have a history of the slave switches failing but the master remaining in service?

Sorry I'm not being very helpful, without an IP address you can't ping that other switch so I'm just tossing out ideas of how to find out if that switch is still in service.

If the data from the slave switch totally disappears, maybe that's your answer, find some OID that will change to no data. Set it to ok if it has whatever the normal data is and Problem if it's anything else.

Good luck,
Kerry