Cisco call manager - Discovery and mapping | Class ?

[KJ18]

In our environment, there are two Cisco Call manager Appliances. These appliances are hardened so normal UNIX commands (like ls, uname etc.) do not work on them. I have painstakingly created a classifier and a horizontal discovery pattern utilizing SNMP OIDs to finally discover both the UCCX Appliances (hardware boxes) and classified them under the "Network Appliance Hardware" Class. 

Now I noticed an 'application' type pattern by the name of "Cisco CallManager". Tested it in debug mode using ssh credentials and the pattern seems to (want to) create connections! Only challenge is that since my horizontal pattern is classifying the hardware under "Network Appliance Hardware" class, the "Cisco CallManager" is not getting triggered.

Questions:

1. How have you planned on discovering the Cisco call manager Hardware and what class is it supposed to classify as? UNIX ?
2. How best can I discover the hardware boxes, classify them appropriately, and Map them using the OOTB "Cisco CallManager" pattern. I have a few ideas, but would like the community's opinions.

[Nic Nagtzaam]

Any chance you could share the OID's you used to pull the serial number? I havent been able to locate the appropriate OID to get this from the appliances. 

[Keith Grindley]

Would you be able to share an overview of the steps you took to accomplish this? We're running into the same issue and would love some tips on how to accomplish the custom pattern that can successfully discover these virtual appliances.

[AbdulBadi]

Hi @KJ18 & COmmunity,

I am currently working through a similar issue with discovering Cisco CallManager virtual appliances hosted on VMware.

The out-of-box Cisco CallManager application pattern successfully connects through SSH and retrieves the CallManager hostname, version, node role, and cluster information. However, final CI creation fails with the following error:

MISSING_DEPENDENCY

No relation was defined for the dependent

Cisco CallManager application class that matches

the required hosting or containment rules.

The Cisco appliances use a restricted administrative CLI, so standard UNIX commands do not provide normal Linux host information. The VMware virtual machines and their hosting infrastructure needs discoverery separately, but the CallManager application pattern is not receiving or creating the required relationship to a compatible host CI.

I saw that you resolved a similar issue by creating a horizontal pattern that discovered the virtual appliance and created a CI type compatible with the out-of-box Cisco CallManager application pattern.

Could you please provide some high-level guidance on the following?

1. Which CMDB class did you use for the Cisco CallManager virtual appliance?
2. Did you create a separate host CI in addition to the VMware VM Instance CI?
3. Which relationship did you use between the Cisco CallManager application CI and its host?
4. Which identification attributes did you populate in the horizontal pattern?
5. How did you associate the SNMP-discovered appliance with the existing VMware VM without creating duplicates?
6. Did the out-of-box Cisco CallManager application pattern trigger automatically after creating the underlying CI?
7. Did you modify the application pattern, classifier, identification rule, or dependent relationship metadata?

I understand that you may not be able to share the actual pattern. Even a high-level overview of the CI class, identifier attributes, relationship type, and trigger method would be very helpful. Happy to connect over Call if you can assist on this.

Thank you.

Abdul Mohammed