how to solve problem of hanging alarms in Huawei U2000

Lets assume that you have U2000 NMS server to monitor Huawei devices. We can manage these
devices in 2 ways: outbound or inbound management. Outbound management means that you have a
separate DCN network to manage devices. It is commonly used for critical nodes, for example for
backbone routers. Unlike to backbone network, it is difficult to implement DCN for mobile backhaul
networks, where the number of devices reaches hundreds of even thousands. In such situation
inbound management is implemented to reduce cost. Then the decision how to send SNMP packets to
the NMS server is based on routing protocols. The packets travel through the monitored network and
are susceptible to all turbulences, which can appear in the network. This may lead to the fact that
some SNMP packets may be lost by the network.

Lets imagine such case. A link between a router and NMS is DOWN. No redundant link is
established. The router sends SNMP trap to the NMS server but the server is not available. The
SNMP packet is lost. Then the link is going to UP state and the router send SNMP trap to U2000.
This trap is then dropped by U2000 because there is not related DOWN trap, which was lost before.

And whats next?

U2000 synchronizes alarms with devices every 30 minutes and NMS server receives DOWN trap
from the router, which was lost earlier. As the clearing trap was dropped, this DOWN alarm will not
be cleared anymore. Then we have DOWN hanging (not cleared) alarm in U2000.

How to cope with this problem?

The first solution is to implement inform mode for SNMP packets:

snmp-agent target-host inform

The managed devices require an acknowledgement from the NM server, after sending inform packets.
If a managed device does not receive the acknowledgement, it will resend the inform packet to the NM
station and generate alarm logs. If the managed device does not receive an acknowledgement from
the NM station, it will store the inform packets in its memory. Anyway using inform mode may
consume lots of system resources.

The next solution is to configure private-netmanager option to trap mode:

snmp-agent target-host trap address udp-domain ip-address [ udp-port port-number |

{ public-net | vpn-instance vpn-instance-name } ] * params securityname security-string
[ { v3 [ authentication | privacy ] | v2c | v1 } | notify-filter-profile profile-name |
private-netmanager | ext-vb ] *

When a Huawei NMS is deployed and this parameter is configured, a trap message sent to the NMS
contains more information, such as the trap type, sequence of the trap, and sending time.
In such situation, even U2000 receives a trap from synchronization, it will compare the sequence of
the trap and sending time. Then we avoid problems of not cleared alarms in network management
system. We have implemented such solution in our customers network and it works really fine.