Hellows... ;-)
The helpful folks at TAC have been trying to troubleshoot one of my last and biggest pending items, which was the perceived inability of DFM to manage the devices on our network. This was a rather puzzling issue, as the other LMS components (CS, CM, RME, etc.) had no apparent issues whatsoever doing everything I asked them to do. After countless hours trying to troubleshoot DFM discovery errors ("questioned" with SNMP timeout despite the fact that all other LMS modules manage the same devices perfectly fine), an alert TAC engineer finally asked whether or not these devices were, in fact actually supported by DFM 3.2 - low and behold, a can of worms opened up!
The best current guess is rather confusing to me: There is a Cisco document out there suggesting that NONE of our devices are among those supported by DFM, while I did find another Cisco document that somewhat contradicts that notion. I’d like to think that this must be confusing (or at least very little known) to TAC as well, since nobody over there considered this a potential culprit for the first almost three weeks of troubleshooting around the globe during countless WebEx sessions. We basically went through everything imaginable (process monitoring with full debugging, complete removal and new installation of DFM only, complete clean-up and re-initialization of all module databases – and in the process tearing down most of my configurations and settings –, to a midnight conference call with developers in India).
The end result appears to be that DFM functionality will not be available to me – please confirm. What are the alternatives? Any rhyme or reason to Cisco not supporting these device types? Any plans to ever do so?
I run a variety of devices on my network, most of them being 3560G, 3560E and 6504E switches, pretty much bread-and-butter variety of basic Cisco devices. Why on earth would there even be a question that these are or are not supported by all LMS modules?
Argument AGAINST support in DFM 3.2:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/net_mgmt/ciscoworks_lan_management_solution/3.2/device_support/table/lms32sdt.html#3.2table
Argument IN FAVOR of support in DFM 3.2:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/net_mgmt/ciscoworks_device_fault_manager/3.2/device_support/table/dfm3_2os.html
According to that list, our 6504E with IOS is fully supported by DFM 3.2 with LMS 3.2, and so are the 3560G and 2950 series switches, the 2500 series router. However, the 3560E series switches are not listed as supported.
Are we seeing ghosts here or have other people had device support issues with DFM?
Thanks,
Matthias
