Good morning! What is the best way to add Elements that are housed in Mobile Vans or containers?
These elements are most of the time unavailable. The Views that contain these elements will always be in alarm. Is it possible to suppress the unavailable state alarm until the element is in use?
I was thinking of hiding these elements and passing the parameters from these elements to a virtual element.
In a booking context, one could indeed use the booking orchestration to start/stop those remote elements, so that they would only generate alarms and time-out events during the active time window.
If the elements are used only within a specific fixed time-frame (e.g. only relevant between 18.00h and 23.30h every weekday), then a fixed schedule can be used (without the need to involve SRM).
Question is indeed if and how DataMiner can be aware of the "until the element is in use".
I suspect that it might also be as follows: you never want to see the time-out on those elements, because when they are in time-out that's because they are not used, and when they are not in time-out, they are in use. So, in that case, we should be more looking for a solution where if one of those elements goes into timeout, then DataMiner suppresses that time-out. Is that how you would want it to be?
In that case, you could make a simple correlation rule that triggers on a Time-out happening (and some additional filtering, e.g. on an element in that specific View, or on those specific elements, etc.).
Upon triggering of the correlation rule, you would specify as an action an Automation script. In that script we should then mask the element, and also unmask it again when the time-out is gone. Not sure if this is doable. Let me check with some people that have more experience on this.
I checked already and we would have to mask the entire element (because masking just the time-out alarm apparently does not make the time-out icon disappear in the surveyor tree – and not even sure if this is intended or a bug). But masking the entire element makes it go away. The correlation rule supports triggering again upon clearing of the event, so that’s ok to then unmask the element. Mainly not sure about the script. The latter can be linked to the element that triggered the correlation, but not sure how to set it up exactly.
Let’s check further and we’ll circle back to you.
You could use an automation script like below, and trigger it from a correlation rule as Ben described. I’m assuming all elements of a certain van or container are in a single view here, and masking all elements in that view.
using Skyline.DataMiner.Automation;
public class Script
{
public static void Run(Engine engine)
{
string elementName = engine.GetScriptParam(“timeOutElement”).Value;
Element e = engine.FindElement(elementName);
string viewName = e.FindView();
Element[] elements = engine.FindElementsInView(viewName);
foreach (Element element in elements)
{
element.Mask(“NotInUse”);
}
}
}
Thanks for this advice!
Hi Jacques,
We implemented a similar solution for a customer managing a fleet of OB trucks in the US. Here is the article OB Truck Manager - DataMiner Dojo
The elements inside the vans can be stopped or paused when unavailable to avoid unnecessary polling. You pause them if you want to keep the latest values of the parameters available in DataMiner.
This can be automated if you can identify a reliable indication of when the vans connect and disconnect. In our case, we used the information in the LLDP Neighbors table of the Arista switches to detect when the truck connected/disconnected.
In our project, the contribution path from the trucks to the TOC contained other elements outside of the truck that generated alarms when the trucks disconnected. We could not stop/pause the entire element because it was used by multiple paths (e.g. network switch). In those cases we need to stop monitoring the specific interfaces linked to each van. We achieved that with the use of alarm templates that filter on the display key. When we want to turn on/off the monitoring on a given interface, we simply update the display key via automation.
Hope that gives you some ideas to build your solution.
Hi Jacques, as such elements are typically used during events such as a concert or sports event, our Service & Resource Management solution can automate this for you. You can find out more about Service and Resource Mangement on https://docs.dataminer.services/user-guide/Standard_Apps/SRM/About_SRM.html
Hello Michiel, we will have a look at this. Maybe this will be a better slolution. Thanks for the info.
Hallo Ben, that is more or less the idea.