Discovery Conditions Windows NIC

Summary

Occasionally on a Windows host, a Network Interface Card (NIC) will fail to return speed-related information. This is primarily due to ADDM being unaware of the NDI Parameters and Enum settings used by a particular Network Interface Card.

How The Pattern Works

By default, this pattern will raise a discovery condition against a Windows host whose Network Interface Card node is lacking speed-related attributes.
Reporting on this discovery condition therefore gives you an indication about the Windows hosts where ADDM cannot currently obtain all the information about the network interface card (NIC).

Within the user configuration options for this pattern, interrogation of the Windows Registry can be enabled; this will cause the pattern module, whenever it raises such a discovery condition, to progress a little further by interrogating the Windows Registry on an affected host and extract information relating to the NIC. When enabled, the interrogation of the Windows Registry is processor intensive, so it is probably best to enable it for short periods only, resetting it back to disabled directly following the scan you wish to perform.

Resolution

Resolution can only come about by ADDM itself increasing its coverage of Windows NICs.

Administrators can assist in this resolution by:

• Going to the pattern module's Configuration section in Pattern Management and temporarily enabling the interrogation of Windows Registry.
• Performing a scan of the host as normal.
• Disabling the interrogation of Windows Registry.
• Generating a report of the DiscoveryCondition and Detail nodes attached to the Host node and forwarding to the ADDM Team (via BMC Customer Support) for analysis.

Reports

To discover if any of your Windows hosts are affected, executing the following query should suffice:

SEARCH DiscoveryCondition WHERE type HAS substring "network interface card"

A query to gather all the NDI parameters together with their descriptions, potential Enum settings and the meaning of each is as follows:

SEARCH DiscoveryCondition WHERE type HAS SUBSTRING "network interface card"
TRAVERSE DiscoveryCondition:DiscoveryCondition:ElementWithCondition:Host
TRAVERSE ElementWithDetail:Detail:Detail:Detail WHERE type = "Network Interface"
TRAVERSE Container:Containment:Contained:Detail
SHOW #Contained:Containment:Container:Detail.name AS "Network Interface", #Contained:Containment:Container:Detail.description AS "Description", name AS "NDI Parameter",
EXPLODE #Container:Containment:Contained:Detail.name AS "Enum Setting",
        #Container:Containment:Contained:Detail.meaning AS "Meaning"

Example Output