[c-nsp] Problems with CiscoWorks LMS 3.0, Device Fault Manager, Mail-Notifications

[Enno Rey]

Hi,

I'm currently struggling with setting up mail notifications with CiscoWorks' DFM. The goal is simple: to send notification mails based on alerts and/or incoming SNMP traps. I've seen this working successfully in one environment but some time ago I tried in vain with LMS 2.6 at the time, being confronted with the same kind of problems I currently encounter (and I gave up then. In fact one of the reasons to upgrade the current systems to LMS 3.0 was the failure of getting it running at that time).

There are two major pieces that have to be configured: notification groups and subscriptions. One can modify/configure "event  sets" (I tried with and without those), but - according to the documentation - using no events sets means that all events/levels of severity are used. The setup seems not too difficult once one understands the structure (albeit I might miss sth) but despite quite some efforts and modifications not one single mail gets sent (even though quite a few alarms can be seen in the alarms view and quite a lot of SNMP traps are coming in). The setup is as follows:

CiscoWorks LMS 3.0 running on W2K3 server, both fully patched (=> DFM 3.0.1).
Set up some user defined groups in Common Services (CS), performed device inventory and some work in other modules, everything seems to work fine for approx. 180 devices.
Set up syslog based mail delivery in RME which works smoothly (so no problems with mail delivery in general).
Alert views in DFM work fine, too.
Tried to get mail notifications running in DFM with
- different device groups,
- different notification groups,
- with (all|none|some) defined events sets,
- some subscriptions

and I never see _any_ effort to send any mail at all. No port 25 traffic at all in wireshark (with the exception of the syslog stuff from RME which works smoothly). I've no idea what could be wrong. This is a fresh install, fully licensed, so no problems with updating modules (which might have been one of the reasons for failure in the past). I see some errors in various DFM logfiles (e.g. in aad.log and others) though that I do not really understand. They may be related or not. However from my understanding of Java stuff and exceptions they _seem_ not related.

Does anybody have any idea what could be wrong? Am I missing something obvious?
I will probably open a TAC case after the weekend but was hoping for some clue from the people here before...

thanks in advance,

Enno




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Enno Rey

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