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.
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.