System Health

Providers are the building blocks of Mellanox NEO. Each provider runs a specific service such as Managing Device Access, Device Provisioning, and IP Discovery. Providers are controlled by a controller.

If a provider is disconnected, a small bell icon appears at the top right corner of the screen. To identify the disconnected provider, click on the “Providers” tab, and in the “Connected” column of the “Providers Information” table, look for the red “thumbs down” icon.

Device Manager

Mellanox NEO ® will collect Chassis Discovery and information on Mellanox switches, such as modules, traps, temperature, ports, OS, etc. For the device manager to receive SNMP traps for all managed switches, all systems must be configured accordingly.

Device Access Manager

The Credentials Provider is responsible for managing the access credentials of all managed systems and groups (defaults).

Devices access credential can be managed via Mellanox NEO™ at three levels:

1. Global level (global groups) – relevant for all devices that use a specific protocol (http, ssh or snmp).

2. Group level – relevant for all devices which belong to a specific user-defined group.

3. Device level – relevant for a specific device for which credentials were set (once unique device access credentials are set, they overwrite global or group credentials definitions.)

The credentials provider is agnostic to the stored attributes, in order to allow support for any protocol in the future.

For more information about access credentials configuration, see “Configuring Access Credentials within Mellanox NEO™”.

Monitor Manager

• Forwards samples of all switch port counters to an internal 3rd party software: InfluxDB

• The controller will sample the counters of all the switches in the fabric at a configurable interval (default=5 minutes). The results will be displayed by InfluxDB.

• For more information, please refer to "Configuring SNMP on Mellanox Onyx Switch (for Port Counters Monitoring)"

ETH Discovery

The role of the ETH Discovery Provider is to discover the Ethernet topology type according to the LLDP protocol. In this phase, the LLDP information is collected using SNMP protocol. The controller initiates the periodic discovery process by providing a list of start-points and connection information. The provider sends the discovered data periodically, when it is containing the CIM objects and relations. The controller aggregator integrates the CIM objects and relations into the existing model and adds new devices as necessary.

For ETH discovery to work properly, the user must configure LLDP for all managed devices. For more information, see "Configuring Mellanox Onyx Switch for LLDP Discovery" and "Configuring Host for LLDP Discovery".

IP Discovery

IP Discovery provider can operate in 2 optional modes:

1. Auto-Discovery – automatic discovery of devices found within a specified range of IP addresses using Mellanox UFM-Agent. In this mode, Mellanox NEO controller discovers all Mellanox Onyx switches by sending multicast messages. Every Mellanox Onyx switch responds to the controller with its IP address. This information is stored in the controller repository.

   Warning

   Mellanox NEO auto-discovery requires multicast traffic to be enabled on the managed switches.

2. Manual IP scan – manual discovery of devices of one or more types found within a specified range of IP addresses, run according to the following algorithm:

• Checks for connectivity with a ping

• If alive, NEO scans all devices and classifies them according to their type, using the following protocols in order:

  1. SNMP classification (SNMP v2, SNMP v3 using global credentials)

  2. SSH connectivity with Linux credentials

  3. WinRM with Windows classification

Device Provisioning

The Device Provisioning function allows the users to play a list of switch CLI commands on a list of Mellanox switches.

To run a command or a series of commands on one device or more:

1. Right-click on the desired devices, and select “Provisioning".

   

2. In the dialog window, type the switch CLI commands that you wish to run on the selected devices, click the “Apply” button, and then “Start”.

   

   Notes:

   • Your category selection will determine the template’s availability according to the chosen device protocol type: a template categorized as “General” will be available for all managed devices, a template categorized as “InfiniBand” will be available for Infiniband devices only, and a template categorized as “Ethernet” will be available for Ether- net devices only.

   • New CLI templates can also be uploaded manually to the Mellanox NEO™ templates folder (/opt/neo/controller/templates).

   • Built-in Linux Cumulus templates are also available

   • To edit the command or create a new one, refer to "Events Policy Settings".

3. Once the commands are initiated, Jobs and Sub-Jobs will be opened accordingly. To view the commands’ outputs, click on the “View Summary” button.

   

Configuring Access Credentials within Mellanox NEO

Using Mellanox NEO GUI

The default global access credentials are detailed in the following table. They can be changed through the “Settings” tab by selecting the “Device Access” view and filling-in the desired credentials for the relevant protocol.

Access Credentials

It is possible to overwrite the defined credentials for a specific group or a specific system in the fabric:

Unique Group Access Credentials

This option can be enabled when creating a new group by checking the “Create Unique Credentials for this Group” checkbox. Once the group is created, its access credentials changeability mode cannot be altered. In case the checkbox is checked, devices for which unique access credentials are defined, will not appear as available for association with this group.

In order to change the access credentials for a specific group, select the desired group, click the “Device Access” tab and edit the credentials for the relevant protocol.

Unique Device Access Credentials

In order to change the access credentials for a specific device, click on the “Devices” sub-menu, select the “Credentials” tab and edit the credentials for the relevant protocol.

This window is meant to grant more stability to the system. NEO can be installed on three nodes so that if the main node (known as the “active” node) fails, another node which has all NEO persistence data saved will take over, and the system will remain functioning properly. The three nodes form a cluster and will constantly be synchronized. While the main node is the active node, the other two will be in a “standby” mode, set in an order from 2-3, according to priority. The standby node can take over the active node in case of a failover due to an error.

The virtual IP address that appears on top of the table in the figure above is the gateway for the NEO UI in all nodes/physical IP addresses listed in the table.

• Each node is identified by its IP address and name.

• “Priority” column enumerates the nodes according to their priority:
  1- the active node
  2- the first node to take over the active node in case of a fail-over
  3- the second node to take over the active node in case of a fail-over

• The colored icons under the “Role” column indicate the node status:
  Blue - active
  Orange - stand-by

• “Core Service” column indicates the health status of the nodes:
  Green - OK
  Red - Failure

• “Data Sync Status” column indicates the time at which the nodes were last updated/synchronized. This status is configured to update every several minutes.

• A right-click on the active node will enable performing a manual fail-over on it. After confirming the action, it might take up to a minute for the stand-by to automatically take over. You might also have to restart the GUI.

• A right-click on any of the stand-by nodes will enable performing a manual take-over.

After confirming the action, it might take up to a minute for the active node to be disabled and the stand-by node to take over.

For HA installation and configuration, please refer to section "Installing NEO for High Availability".

Logs View

The Logs window provides a summary of all activities performed by Mellanox NEO in a list that can be filtered for NEO providers, log types and the number of the last lines.

By clicking “Download Logs”, all logs for all NEO providers and log types will be saved in one tar.gz file that can be downloaded.

Log Types

• console.log – contains the union of related component (controller or provider) logs

• controller.log – contains logging information for Mellanox NEO’s central controller component

• events.log – contains logging information regarding events of a related component

• jobs.log – contains logging information regarding related component jobs (currently running actions)

• repository.log - contains logging information on related component repository changes

• zmq.log – contains logging information on related component ZMQ communication

• rest.log - contains logging information on rest calls for a related component

• web-info.log – contains logging information on web access of a controller

• monitors.log – contains logging information on InfluxDB accessing via controller monitoring API

  Warning

  InfluxDB is a Scalable Realtime Graphing open source tool (http://InfluxDB.wikidot.com/start) licensed by Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

• web-access.log – contains logging information on web access of a specific internal service

Log files are located in the file system, according to the specific component (Controller or Provider):

• Controller logs are located at: /opt/neo/controller/log

• Access Credentials Provider logs are located at: /opt/neo/providers/ac/log

• IP Discovery Provider logs located at: /opt/neo/providers/discovery/log

• Device Manager Provider logs located at: /opt/neo/providers/dm/log

• Monitoring Provider logs located at: /opt/neo/providers/monitor/log

• Provisioning Provider logs located at: /opt/neo/providers/provisioning/log

• ETH Discovery Provider logs located at: eth discovery log /opt/neo/providers/ethdisc/ log/

• Solution Manager logs located at: /opt/neo/providers/solution/log/

• IB Manager logs located at: /opt/neo/providers/ib/log/