How do I manage events on Cisco APIC clusters? (Event deduplication)

Introduction

To view Cisco APIC clusters

To enable or disable the raising of events against APIC clusters

To configure which events are raised and where

Introduction:

It is possible to run Cisco APICs in a clustered configuration where ACI fabric devices can be managed by more than one APIC.

An event raised by a given fabric node will generate alerts on all the APIC controllers that are managing it. From Entuity v21.0 upwards, it is possible to deduplicate these events - you can specify whether an event raised on a given ACI fabric node will also raise events on all the APIC controllers that are managing the node, or if the original event is simply visible on those controllers.

To view Cisco APIC clusters:

You can view details for a Cisco APIC cluster from its Summary dashboard, which contains the following information:

• Key Info - this is a Key Info dashlet. This dashlet details the farbic domain name, fabric ID number and whether cluster events are enabled.
• Incident Summary - this is an Incidents Summary dashlet. This dashlet displays a pie chart of the incidents by severity level on this APIC cluster.
• APICs - this is a Table dashlet. This dashlet lists and links to each of the APIC cluster's managing APIC controllers.

There are 3 ways to navigate to an APIC cluster summary dashboard:

• Navigate to the Key Info dashlet of an APIC controller (e.g. on the Summary dashboard for an APIC controller), and click Show Cluster.
  
  
  
  
• Navigate to the Associations dashboard of an APIC controller, and in the Show associations of type dropdown field, select 'Cluster'.
  
• Via the Search icon in the top right of the browser, searching the cluster name with the Type = 'All Objects'.

To enable or disable the raising of events against APIC clusters:

You can enable or disable the raising of events against APIC clusters from two places:

• Navigate to the Summary dashboard of an APIC Cluster. Right-click the cluster name in the breadcrumbs (or via the Overflow Menu), and for the Raise Events on Cluster option, specify Enable or Disable.
• Navigate to the Attributes dashboard of an APIC Cluster. Right-click the Cluster Events Enabled attribute and click Edit Attribute (or click the edit icon ) and change the value to either Yes or No.

If APIC cluster events are disabled, then only the APIC controller events will be raised.

To configure which events are raised and where:

If APIC cluster events are enabled (see above), then you can configure Entuity to raise events against them in one of two ways. This is specified via the following parameter of the [aci] section under entuity.cfg:

[aci]
raiseSeparateClusterEvents=0

Whereby:

• =0 - events on APIC cluster objects will also be displayed on the source APIC controllers.
  
  In this case, there is just a single event raised - the event raised on the APIC cluster. This event can also then be seen on the APIC controller where this event has been seen. The possible events that can be raised are ACI Event, ACI Fault, and ACI Fault Cleared.
  
  Third party event recipients, e.g. BMC Remedy, will be able to receive the Entuity event that was raised against the APIC cluster.
  
  
• =1 - raises separate events on APIC clusters and APIC controllers.
  
  In this case, an event will be raised against the APIC cluster, and events will also be raised against the APIC controllers where the events have been seen. In this case, both event types will appear on an event list seen on an object higher up the object hierarchy tree, and both types of event will contain the same information as its counterpart. The possible events that can be raised are ACI Cluster Event, ACI Cluster Fault (on the cluster object only), ACI Cluster Fault Cleared (on the cluster object only), ACI Event (on the cluster object only), ACI Fault, and ACI Fault Cleared.
  
  Third party event recipients will require condition filters to receive only the desired event types.

Examples:

We have APIC controllers X, Y and Z, which belong to APIC cluster C. An event occurs on APIC cluster C, and APIC controllers X and Y have contributed to that event on cluster C.

If raiseSeparateClusterEvents is set to 0:

• an ACI event (ACI Event or ACI Fault) will be raised on APIC cluster object C. This event will provide details stating that the event occured on controllers X and Y.
• this ACI event will also be visible on both controller X and controller Y where it has been seen. It is the exact same ACI event that is raised on cluster C, controller X and controller Y - it is visible on X and Y because they are children of C in the object hierarchy, and as descendants of the originating object their Events List tables will display the original event.

If raiseSeparateClusterEvents is set to 1:

• a cluster event (ACI Cluster Event or ACI Cluster Fault) will be raised on the APIC cluster object C. This event will provide details stating that the event occured on controllers X and Y, where it has been seen.
• an ACI event (ACI Event or ACI Fault) will be raised on both controller X and controller Y.
• no event occurred on controller Z, and so no event is raised on that controller, and nor are there details of it mentioned in the ACI Cluster Event on cluster C.