COMNET III

Chapter 13. Miscellaneous Reports
transit net/cloud icon will be colored in the 2-D view, and will retain that color until the
alarm clears, even if subsequent alarms of different colors sound.
Note that nodes and links can be configured to trigger model traffic upon the sounding or
clearing of an alarm. This a very powerful, and very dangerous, feature. It is important to
remember that, in combination with triggers, alarms have the ability to change model
behavior, in which case they are more than mere instrumentation.
If you have an alarm set in your model, but you do not want to watch the simulation waiting
for a color change, you can configure the alarm to force the simulation into single step mode
when it sounds. To permit the simulation to continue running without further interruption,
typically you must first reconfigure the alarm so it no longer forces single step mode, then
use the Trace option to turn off single step.
As with post-run reports, your simulation will run slower when you have more snapshot
reports turned on. A few snapshot reports are on by default, but these snapshots will have
no effect on speed of simulation. One is the Disk Error snapshot report. It counts the number
of disk errors, such as attempting to read from a non-existent file. When the number exceeds
1, an alarm sounds. For most models, a disk error indicates a mistake in the model.
Turning on Remember values and Export values at end will result in a file with the suffix
.snp being written to the model directory. The file is a text file, either tab or comma
delimited, containing each snapshot value for all snapshots turned on in the model.
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