Monitoring the status of a physical link

We've got two Link Controllers running 10.1.0 that are in an HA pair. I'm trying to get alerting from the LCs so that if a physical link goes down, I get an e-mail. We have SNMP configured and traps are being sent to our SNMP console. I also have e-mails coming directly from the LCs using the information in SOL 3667. That works for the pools and virtual servers I have configured on this but the notifications I'm getting for the physical link up/down aren't making sense. On one particular link I'm getting two alerts at a time stating that the link is up but I never get an alert that the link is down. This is the raw SNMP trap that's received by our console.

 

 

I've tried modifying the alert in alertd.conf so that it sends an e-mail as well as does the trap, similar to what I've done for the pools and VSs, but I've yet to receive an e-mail from the LCs about a physical link going up/down.

 

 

So my question is, what is the preferred/official method for monitoring the state of a physical connection? Preferably I'd like to have both an SNMP trap and a locally generated e-mail for this alert. The reason this is important is that we just installed some IPS appliances inline with the outbound connections on the LCs. I need a way to determine if the alerts I'm getting about the VSs (DNS, default gateway, etc) are because the IPS appliances are blocking the traffic or if the physical link is up or down. I'm thinking that if we get just the VS alert then it would be safe to say that the IPS is blocking the traffic but if we get an alert for a VS and a link, then it's the physical link that's down. Thanks!