Port Availability reports

To run a Port Availability report

The Port Availability report provides a summary of port availability. This report uses two key metrics:

• Availability, calculated as a measure of the port's availabiltiy during the reporting period. It has one of three states: Up, Down, Unknown (?).
  • Entuity uses two MIB variables for this report:
    • operational state of the port (ifOperState).
    • last time that the port's state changed (ifLastChangeTime). Because the polling is scheduled at regular intervals, the ifLastChangeTime read on a successful poll provides the actual time at which the current state was entered.
  • The availability calculation is supplemented through monitoring of the port's Port Link Up and Port Link Down SNMP traps. These indicate the state of the port between pollings. You must have enabled SNMP trap forwarding on the device.
• Reachability, the proportion of time that Entuity can confirm the port is reachable during the reporting period. A port is considered reachable when Entuity successfully polls the port's ifOperState, unreachable if it cannot.
  • Entuity calculates reachability using the state (ifOperState) information retrieved during
    polling. If a null poll occurs, then the reachability figure is affected by the time stamp for the poll.
    • For example, consider hourly polling and a report over an hourly period. Say the
      hourly poll occurs at 15 minutes past the hour and that Entuity polls in the hours before, during and after the report period. Furthermore, say the poll before was null, the poll during was valid and the poll after was null. Then reachability is 75% since the null poll can account for 25% of the reportable hour, but the valid poll at 15 minutes past the hour renders the component reachable for the remaining time.

By default, the reprot is restricted to router (WAN) ports, but the port filter can be:

• amended to include all ports.
• restricted to other types of ports, e.g. leased line, frame relay.

By default, the report does not include ports that are 100% available in the Reachability and Availability tables, but does include these ports in the mean totals for port Reachability and Availability.

Unlike other Entuity availability measures that are based on results from ping, this report's information is derived from both SNMP polling of port MIB variables, and SNMP traps received by Entuity.

Entuity retains data for the Port Availability report for the last fourteen days, i.e. reports can only be run over the last fourteen days. The retention time can be extended by amending the configuration.

This report displays statistics in Header, Executive Summary, Port Details table and Port Details graph sections.

To run a Port Availability report:

1. In the Main Menu, click Reports.
2. This will open the Reports page. Click Availability Reports.
3. This will open the Availability Reports page. Click Port Availability.
4. This will open the Port Availability Options page.
5. If you want to reuse previously saved report values, select it in the Use saved values dropdown field.
6. Specify the format of the report in the Report format field.
7. Specify the View against which the report is to be run in the Please select a View dropdown field. From ENA v18.0 P06 upwards, you can drag Views into this field from the Drop Box.
8. Enter a desired number in the Maximum displayed ports field.
9. Tick any of or all the following boxes, depending on which information you would like displayed in the report:
   • Use device System Name.
   • Include ports with full Availability.
   • Include ports that are Admin Down.
   • Display Availability Charts.
   • Exclude Virtual Ports.
   • Exclude Spare Ports.
   • Exclude Host Ports.
   • Exclude Core Ports.
10. Specify if you want the Report Period to be a Recent period or across a Range.
11. Specify the time within the reporting period for which the report is applicable in the Prime Time fields, e.g. between 09:00 and 17:00 each day.
12. ENA v17.0 P08 upwards: Specify the time zone to which you want the reporting period to apply. By default, this is set to None, which means that the time zone of the host/consolidation server is used.
13. Click Save to save your report values, Run to run immediately, or click Cancel.