High Availability (HA) Alerting in Auvik

Monitoring High Availability (HA) firewall or network device pairs in Auvik requires proactive alerting to ensure failovers are detected and appropriately acted on. Auvik’s Alerts V2 system allows configuration of alerts tied to HA conditions, enabling early detection of role changes or unexpected failovers.

What Can Be Monitored in an HA Pair?

Depending on the vendor and device capabilities, Auvik can monitor and alert on:

• HA state or role change (e.g., Active → Standby, or vice versa)
• Device Status (This will be limited to secondary firewalls that respond to ICMP and SNMP )

Auvik can directly interpret some HA protocols primarily using SNMP polling, device availability, and v2 alert conditions to provide visibility. 

Best Practices for Using Auvik’s Native HA Support

Native HA monitoring in Auvik is dependent on supported firewalls. If a UI widget indicating the nodes in a firewall cluster appears on the device’s details page - then alerting will work for that device.

In some Active Passive clusters, the dormant node does not respond to ICMP or SNMP, the two methods that Auvik requires to determine an online or offline state. Native support will prevent a passive device from being deleted due to lack of response to Auvik’s Health Checks or SNMP queries. This will retain configuration backups to the device that was active at that time.

1. Create v2 Alerts
   1. Firewall HA alerting is under the Device category.
   2. Select “HA Failover has Occurred” and set it to True.
   3. Create a trigger message using the variables below:
      1. "firewallHaInfo.failoverHasHappened",
      2. "firewallHaInfo.syncIsHealthy",
      3. "firewallHaInfo.masterSerialNumber",
      4. "firewallHaInfo.clusterMode",
      5. "firewallHaInfo.syncIsHealthy",
   4. There should not be an alert delay on HA alerts.
   5. Create a clear condition using either of the following options
      1. No Clear Condition - This will require manual dismissal
      2. Custom Clear Condition - The recommended clear condition is that the HA Cluster Sync is Healthy and set it to “True.” This will require that after a swap occurs, that the configuration sync is true for the original trigger condition to resolve.

Auvik’s Native HA Support Limitations

• Auvik cannot parse or interpret vendor-specific HA logs.
• Auvik will display which firewall is Active in the UI but will only display the active serial number via Alert variables

Building Custom HA Support

Even in circumstances where Auvik does not support a firewall natively - it is still possible to monitor the HA status using the custom OID polling functionality. 

As of this writing, custom OID alerting is not possible in v2 Alerting.

Related Articles:

• Firewall Configuration Backups in High Availability (HA) Environments
• Assigning Auvik Collectors in Dual-Firewall Environments
• How to Create a Custom Alert in Auvik Alerts V2