Receiving SNMP Traps

---

WhatsUp Gold has an internal SNMP trap handler, which when enabled, listens for and accepts SNMP traps that are addressed to it. A trap is sent when the status of a device changes. Traps are unsolicited messages, such as a router indicating one of its interfaces went down or a printer indicating it is out of paper.

When a trap arrives from a device, WhatsUp Gold highlights the device's display name, and the event triangle on the network map to show a status change and records the trap information in the device's Log dialog box (found by right-clicking a device, selecting Quick Status->Log), and in the Activity Log.

You can also set up WhatsUp Gold to send a notification message (via Beeper, Group, Pager, SMTPMail, Sound, WinPopup, or Voice) when a trap is received for a device.

To receive traps in WhatsUp Gold, you need to do the following:

1. On each physical device that will be monitored, set the SNMP agent to send traps to WhatsUp Gold. This cannot be done from WhatsUp Gold.
2. If you have vendor-provided devices, run the MIB Extractor as described in "Setting Up the MIB Identifiers".

   Enable the SNMP Trap Handler. (Select Configure->Program Options->Event Servers. Select SNMP Traps, and click the Configure button. Select Enable SNMP Trap Handler, and then click OK.)

   

Note: If the SNMP agent is installed on the WhatsUp Gold machine, this will also start an SNMP trap service. This can result in a port conflict, because both the SNMP trap service and the WhatsUp Gold SNMP trap handler listen on port 162. To fix this, you need to turn off the SNMP trap service.

3. Set up any events and notifications for traps as described in the following sections.

Setting Up SNMP Trap Events

If the exact SNMP Trap event you need is not already in the Events Library, then you need to create one. For a refresher on how to do this, see "Adding Events to the Events Library". For this example, there might be two traps you want WhatsUp Gold to keep you informed of:

• badVoltage,apc,6,49
• batteryOverTemperature,apc,6,53

We are going to create an event for the Bad Voltage trap.

1. From the Events Library, select SNMP traps, and click Add.
   
2. Display Name. Enter "Bad Voltage" for this event.
3. Enterprise/OID. You can use the browse button to select the desired MIB. But we already know what we want, so just enter "apc".
4. Generic Type (Major). Select "6" - Enterprise Specific.
5. Specific Type (Minor). This can have an integer value from 0 to 2147483647. For our example, enter "49".
6. Click OK.

Note: Bad Voltage is now in the Events Library within SNMP Traps. It is also written to the WhatsUp Gold install directory\Event\SNMP Traps.

Assigning SNMP Trap Events to a Device

To assign the Bad Voltage event to a device, go into device properties and select Events. Click Add and browse to your event, select it and click OK.

Note: You can add multiple events to a device.

Setting Up Notifications for SNMP Trap Events

You can set up WhatsUp Gold to send a notification when an SNMP trap is received for a device. You can specify that the notification is sent when any trap message is received or when a specified trap number(s) is received. For background information about SNMP traps and trap numbers, see "SNMP Traps".

To set up a notification for our "Bad Voltage" trap, do the following:

1. In the device properties, click Alerts.
   

Note: To do this for a subnet icon or container icon, right-click the icon, select Properties, and click Alerts. (You cannot assign events to a subnet.)

2. Select Enable Alerts and Enable Logging.
3. In the Alerts section, click Add.

   The "Add Alert" dialog box appears.

   

4. From the list box, select the notification you want to send when this device receives a trap message.

   You can create new notifications and make them available in the list box. See the "Defining Notifications" for the step-by-step procedure.

5. Select the On Event option.

   When this option is selected, the Select Events button to the right is enabled. You can click this button to see all of the available events associated to this device.

   

   As shown in the two screen shots, there are two option buttons you can choose, and depending on which one you choose, you see a different behavior. In this example, there is only ONE event to pick, but if you had several events on this device, you could select ALL of them, or select specific ones.

6. Click OK to go back to the Alerts menu.

   Note that the notification of the event is sent as soon as the event happens: the Trigger value is ignored. The trap text can be included in mail notifications if you use the %m variable. For more information, see "Notification Message Variables".

Note: A notification will also be sent if the device misses the number of polls specified in the Trigger box. If you want to be notified only of an SNMP trap, you can set the Trigger to 9999.

7. Set the Time Period in which you want the notification to be active.
8. Click OK to save your changes. The notification is added to the device's list of notifications.
9. In Alerts, click OK to save changes and exit the dialog box.

Viewing Trap Log Entries

SNMP traps are logged regardless of whether or not you have enabled log activity for the device.

To view trap information for a device, right-click the device, select Quick Status and click Log.

To view trap information for all devices, from the Logs menu, select SNMP Trap Log.

Ipswitch, Inc. http://www.ipswitch.com

©Ipswitch 2003