I have read alot of docs and other posts. What are the best practices for ports that have nothing plugged into them? Libre sees them as down. I want to know if a device gets plugged into a port that is not in a shut down state.
Do I ignore the ports and if the status changes it will kick an alert? I can establish a baseline of what ports are down, but I don’t want them being marked in an error state. I don’t necessarily want to disable them.
What’s the best practice?
I personally don’t use the ports up and down rule. For my environment it makes no sense and just causes alert madness where start ignoring alerts. I don’t need to know if a port goes down. On my core network I do monitor the links and use it for that. Using the port phaser discription. Found in the docs.
The key with any network monitoring tool is to only alert on what it’s most important and keep the noise down with the alerts. No need to alert on everything.
Our scenario is we have wireless backhauls with separate management interfaces. The transport interface can go down, but the management interface still stays up. Due to redundancy we don’t know if a port went down unless we are doing OSPF adjacency logging, which can get to be quite complex.
You can use some kind of description to identify those backhauls ports, and base your alerting on that. If a port that has “whatever specific description” goes down, trigger alert. You can even define the criticity in depending on the description. That’s what we do here.