Cisco Prime 3.1 - Alarms by Site/Location

[ds_warwick]

Prime 3.1.5

I'm trying to develop a way to see which sites/locations within Prime have got critical alarms using the REST API.

I want to use this to understand which sites have got access points offline (for reporting purposes). Access points that are offline generate a critical alarm.

I thought I could query the /webacs/api/v1/op/groups/sites node of the REST API.

According to the documentation, this should retrieve all of the sites as well as any critical alarms associated with those sites. My logic is that if an access point is down at one of those sites, it should be included in the critical alarm count against the site.

The issue I'm hitting is that some fields like alarms and device count are always zero for every site, even though I know the site has critical alarms or access points offline and I can see alarms in the Prime GUI.

  <siteOpDTO>

    <apCount>2</apCount>

    <clearedAlarms>0</clearedAlarms>                          <-------------------- this is always zero

    <clientCount>15</clientCount>

    <criticalAlarms>0</criticalAlarms>                          <-------------------- this is always zero

    <deviceCount>0</deviceCount>

    <groupId>14582291326</groupId>

    <groupName>Third Floor</groupName>

    <informationAlarms>0</informationAlarms>

    <latitude>0.0</latitude>

    <longitude>0.0</longitude>

    <majorAlarms>0</majorAlarms>                          <-------------------- this is always zero

    <minorAlarms>0</minorAlarms>                          <-------------------- this is always zero

    <name>Location/All Locations/Hotels/BigHotel</name>

    <siteType>Floor Area</siteType>

    <warningAlarms>0</warningAlarms>                          <-------------------- this is always zero

  </siteOpDTO>

Have I misunderstood something or is my version of Prime returning incorrect information?

Darren.

[Spencer Zier · Accepted solution]

My apologies for not getting back to you sooner.  I've been on bereavement leave and then had to spend a little time researching your issue.

So, in 3.1.x the behavior is that AP related alarms are reported to the site where the controller is located.  Since your device count in that site is 0 (indicating that the controller is not located here), it's expected that the alarms for the down APs will not be reported here.  This should be consistent across the UI and API.  If you are seeing alarms for this particular site in the UI, please reach out to me via email (in my profile) and we can dig deeper.

We realize that this is not optimal behavior, so in 3.2 (which has recently been posted to cisco.com for download) we changed the behavior to report these AP-specific alarms in the site where the AP is located.

[ds_warwick]

Thanks for your reply.

This makes sense, although I do not know why it should be designed that way. We only use Prime for wireless management and monitoring and don't use it for any other type of device other than controllers and access points.

We will look at upgrading to 3.2 in the future and thanks again for your detailed response.

Daren.