Traverse Status Values

The terms Status, State, and Severity are used interchangebly to indicate the current status of a test, device or container. Typical states include OK, WARNING, and CRITICAL. The status of a lower-level object, such as test can set the status of higher level object, such as a device or container. Status display changes and notifications are based on transitions between states.

The following figure displays the Traverse icons used to display device and test status. Usually clicking the status icons on the screen displays more information about the status.

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Icon	Description
OK	The test was within configured thresholds.
WARNING	The test violated the Warning threshold
CRITICAL	The test violated the Critical threshold, or alternately it Failed to perform for some reason. See the description for FAIL below.
TRANSIENT	Test status is TRANSIENT if the test's status has changed, but the flap prevention threshold has not been crossed. (The flap prevention threshold is described in Creating a New Device and can be set globally, per device or per test). For example, if you configure a test so that no action is taken until the result has been CRITICAL for three test cycles, test status changes to TRANSIENT after the first CRITICAL result is returned. It remains TRANSIENT until either the problem is resolved, in which case test status changes to a lower severity, or the third CRITICAL result is returned, after which test status is CRITICAL and appropriate action is taken.
UNKNOWN	The test status can be UNKNOWN for one of several reasons: see the expanded description below. This can be monitor dependent. These tests have a value of -1.
UNREACHABLE	A test is in this state if all the `parent' devices are down and the downstream device is unreachable based on the topology. These tests are stored with a value of -3. This state is useful to prevent alarm floods when a parent device goes down in a network.
FAIL	The device was reached but the test failed to be performed. An example is when a POP3 port test is performed and the supplied login/password combination fails. This is monitor dependent. These tests are represented by the CRITICAL icon. These tests have a special value of -2.
SUSPENDED	The test is disabled. Disabling tests allows you to perform maintenance tasks on a device without receiving alerts while the device is offline. Once a device is suspended, the polling and data collection for all the tests on the device is suspended and thus any associated actions to the tests will not generate notifications (see SUPPRESSED). These tests are stored with a value of -4.
SUPPRESSED	The test is not displayed at its actual severity level, and its status does not affect the status of the associated device or container. When the test changes state, the suppressed flag is automatically cleared. See Suppressing Tests.
NOTCONFIGURED	If there are no tests configured for a device in that category.

Test status can be UNKNOWN for one of several reasons:

When a new test is created, provisioning adds the test to a queue until the provisioning is complete. During this time the web application shows the test in an UNKNOWN state.
Some tests do a rate calculation ([result1 - result2] / time_elapsed_between_tests), which requires two polled results. For example, most network interface tests (Traffic In/Out, Util In/Out) are in this category. Until the second result is polled, these tests show an UNKNOWN state. If a test is configured for a five-minute polling interval, it remains in an UNKNOWN state for approximately ten minutes, until two results are received and the rate is calculated.
If the flap-prevention feature is enabled, any test that is in the process of changing its state will show a TRANSIENT state for the configured cycles. For example, if flap-prevention cycle is configured to be 2, and a ping test is configured for a 3 minute interval, when the ping test switches from OK to WARNING, until the test remains in the new state for 2 additional cycles (6 min), the test will be shown in TRANSIENT state.
If a Traverse process is not running, newly added tests will not return any results and the tests will show an UNKNOWN state. When you drill down into devices with older tests, they will show values under TEST TIME and DURATION columns in a light blue color, indicating outdated results.
If a device is not reachable (e.g., it's been turned off or there are network problems, etc.), tests for that device appear in an UNKNOWN state, indicating that no polled value could be retrieved.
In the case of SNMP tests, if the OID is no longer valid (for example, if the Index has changed), the test appears in an UNKNOWN state, indicating that no polled value could be retrieved.