how can i alert when link is up but eigrp peer (next hop) is down
hi, I am hoping someone can give me some suggestions on how to alert when my Cisco router's interface is up/up but the other side is not responding. I just discovered that I have been running on a backup line for a while at one site and did not know it because the primary link did not go "down"
is there anything I can do with monitoring eigrp peers etc. It did occur to me that if I set up an sla on the router, I might be able to leverage that, but I would like a solution that did not involve more config on the router.
thanks in advance
Hi Tony,
I think the most obvious route would be to find a Nagios plugin that does what you want, and then adding it to Observium.
Observium has some native alerting capability gaps and relies on nagios plugins to cover them, one being handling this sort of "transient" state.
The two EIGRP plugins I can see are absolutely ancient though, so I'm not sure how well they'll still work.
adam.
Tony Guadagno via observium wrote on 26/03/2026 13:30:
hi, I am hoping someone can give me some suggestions on how to alert when my Cisco router's interface is up/up but the other side is not responding. I just discovered that I have been running on a backup line for a while at one site and did not know it because the primary link did not go "down"
is there anything I can do with monitoring eigrp peers etc. It did occur to me that if I set up an sla on the router, I might be able to leverage that, but I would like a solution that did not involve more config on the router.
thanks in advance _______________________________________________ observium mailing list -- observium@lists.observium.org To unsubscribe send an email to observium-leave@lists.observium.org
Adam, thanks for the suggestion. So, if i used a Nagios plugin, i would create a probe based on that? So, if i had 100 routers, i would need 100 probes?
I was also wondering about utilizing Cisco's SLA's to do this. I see that Observium has an alert checker class called "sla" is that the same sla as the cisco sla's?
thanks
Just to be clear, I am really trying to alert when a link becomes unusable (ie link is up but traffic cannot pass), EIGRP, was just one thought, but it does not have to be EIGRP, that's why i am wondering about SLA's
BFD/IP-SLA is probably the correct solution here.
Or just basic traffic levels?
adam.
Tony Guadagno via observium wrote on 27/03/2026 12:39:
Just to be clear, I am really trying to alert when a link becomes unusable (ie link is up but traffic cannot pass), EIGRP, was just one thought, but it does not have to be EIGRP, that's why i am wondering about SLA's _______________________________________________ observium mailing list -- observium@lists.observium.org To unsubscribe send an email to observium-leave@lists.observium.org
Yeah, you'd need to create a probe for each.
Our SLA feature is named after Cisco's implementation's new name (it used to be rtr!), other vendors call it different things.
This is the general solution for monitoring link health, and we have sort of decent support for it.
adam.
Tony Guadagno via observium wrote on 27/03/2026 12:36:
Adam, thanks for the suggestion. So, if i used a Nagios plugin, i would create a probe based on that? So, if i had 100 routers, i would need 100 probes?
I was also wondering about utilizing Cisco's SLA's to do this. I see that Observium has an alert checker class called "sla" is that the same sla as the cisco sla's?
thanks _______________________________________________ observium mailing list -- observium@lists.observium.org To unsubscribe send an email to observium-leave@lists.observium.org
Adam, as it happens, last night, we had an event. at a particular site, the wan link went down (hard). observium noticed this and because i have an alert for "link down" we got an alert as expected. The odd thing is that also at this site, i have an SLA checker to notify if "rtt_event notequal ok" The event log of that device shows that the SLA changed from ok -> alert. however, the Alert Log makes no mention of the check failing and i did not receive an email from the SLA checker (only the Link Down checker).
i have some screenshots i will attach.
can you explain why the sla checker did not fail its check when it saw a state change? thanks
participants (2)
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Adam Armstrong -
Tony Guadagno