White Papers

4 Monitoring Dell Force10 Ethernet Switches Using Dell SupportAssist | Version 1.1 | February 2014
Introduction
Dell SupportAssist is a remote support application providing proactive support capabilities that help
identify and resolve issues faster and more accurately. It integrates with Dell OpenManage Essentials, and
enables transparent visibility to your server, storage, and networking infrastructure, and proactively
identifies hardware failures in your IT environment.
SupportAssist is designed with automated proactive features to help streamline support process steps,
maintain your systems’ health, and identify hardware failures faster and more accurately.
The key features of SupportAssist include:
 Remote monitoring for critical hardware alerts.
 Automatic collection of diagnostic logs and configuration information.
 Automatic case creation and alert notifications through email.
 Proactive support from a ProSupport Engineer, who has the information required to start resolving
your case immediately.
SupportAssist gives you more oversight and control over your environment without the hassle of manual
processes and more time. Equipping your OpenManage Essentials server with SupportAssist is voluntary,
recommended for ProSupport and ProSupport Plus contracts and results in improved support, products,
and services designed to meet your needs.
OpenManage Essentials interacts with supported devices that are to be monitored and receives SNMP
traps. The SNMP traps are periodically retrieved as alerts by the SupportAssist application. The alerts are
filtered using various policies to decide if the alerts qualify for creating a new support case or updating an
existing support case.
All qualifying alerts are securely sent to the SupportAssist server hosted by Dell, for creating a new support
case or updating an existing support case. After the support case is created or updated, the SupportAssist
application runs the appropriate collection tools on the devices that generated the alerts, and uploads the
log collection to Dell.
The information in the log collection is used by Dell technical support to troubleshoot the issue and
provide an appropriate solution.
This technical white paper provides information about monitoring Dell Force10 Ethernet switches using
Dell SupportAssist. The following are the high-level areas covered:
 Steps to perform discovery and inventory
 Configuring credentials in SupportAssist for Force10 Ethernet switches
 Alert processing
 Case creation in SupportAssist for an alert
 Sending system logs manually