Why use SNMP Traps in Orion Alerts

baneland

Hello,

I'm not familiar with SNMP or SNMP Traps. I understand the basic concept, but I would like to know in what situation you would use a trap.

Considering that Orion and Orion SAM Alerts more or less are doing the same thing.

I noticed that Orion Alerts have an escalation level in which you can set a trap, this made me very curious.

So at the expense of sounding dumb.

What situations would be useful situations where you would like a trap triggered?

Does anyone have any cool alerts they created where having it trigger a trap was useful?

wlipford

You have SNMP Get and SNMP Traps. SNMP Get is what most people think of when they think about SNMP. In basic terms, you network monitoring software periodically sends a GET request to the SNMP device asking for a piece of information such as CPU utilization, disk space, network byes, or anything else the software/hardware vendor wants you to be able to see. The software continues to poll the device over a period of time and might send alerts if the response comes back with something out of range.

The part of SNMP that most people forget about is SNMP traps and they can basically work exactly like syslog. A trap is a threshold defined in the device by the user to sent an SNMP packet back to the monitoring server. For example you might have a trap set to notify when disk usage reaches a certain percent or when a network interface goes down. This is the most immediate way to setup an alert as you do not have to wait for the monitoring software to poll again.

Beyond that you can also use SNMP for device configuration via SNMP set. Basically you can send a command to a device and tell it to change a setting. I used to use this in an ISP environment to send a reboot command to a wireless modem or to turn off the ethernet port to a customer who had not paid their bill.