Help, Harris Stratex Microwave equipment uses an odd SNMP community string layout.

Question

Hi Community,

We have several hundred Harris/Stratex Microwave devices most with multiple radio cards we urgently need to monitor.  The SNMP setup is very strange and is not really compatible with SolarWinds.  They seem to use the community string more like a "context". Let me explain.

The System detail can me accessed using the community string "terminal".  Using a set of Universal Pollers I can collect the information about the cards in the device, their asset information and base status.  If I need more information like the frequency, modulation method or receiver signal level (RSL - that's the important one) I need to use the  community string related  to the slot the card is in i.e. if the Radio card is in slot1 of the chassis, the community string would be "slot1",  the OIDs related to the Radio card are populated for that card.  If there was another card in say slot3, the community string would be "slot3" and the same OIDs would be populated with it's data.

When I raised this problem with SolarWinds Support and their response was "raise a feature request". However, given there seems to be little chance they will ever implement anything that will help us, I'm turning to the Community...

Cheers, Peter

zeb146 · Answer

Hi @Jalal,

I raised a feature request but I'm not holding out much hope.  I note, for example, the SNMP proxy feature requests seem to have been around for years without any discernable action and I would have thought that to be extremely important in firewalled environments. What I would like to see is the ability to override the node community string for a given Universal Device Poller element.

I was going to write some code to execute the checks external to SolarWinds and use SAM to display the results but that would mean greatly expanding our SAM license.  Having said all that... Management (here) is probably feeling nervous about spending any more money with SolarWinds given the current issues, so that's probably not going to happen.

Peter

Jalal · Answer

Hi Peter,

I've got the same problem with some Aviat (previously Harris Stratex) Eclipse/CTR equipment. What I was considering doing was create a separate node for each context, and poll all the information required in each, then create a Dashboard View that becomes the single place for all the information associated with the Platform. Alternatively you could create a dashboard view per microwave link.
Unfortunately it became more work than I had time for so I didn't get a chance to find a solution. I'm able to use the vendor NMS in the meantime. If you find a solution please let me know.