SNMP Drops

Question

I have a Cisco ASA 5500 at one of our branch offices and SNMP seems to randomly drop.  SolarWinds, which is at the main location, gives me an alert saying that the ASA has stopped responding yet the ASA and the circuit never went down.  Sitting in front of the ASA is a Cisco 3560 switch; there is a VLAN for WAN traffic and then several other VLANS for LAN traffic.  SNMP seems to work fine for several days and then randomly this issue occurs.   After I log onto the ASA it seems as through SolarWinds can then communicate via SNMP to the ASA.  Also, according to SolarWinds the interfaces on the switch goes into an unknown state when this is happening however not to a point of getting an alert saying that the switch has stopped responding.  Any ideas?  Is this an Cisco issue with the ASA or switch?  Or is this  a SolarWinds issue?

Donald_Francis · Answer

Sounds like SNMP like you say is being dropped.  The most common issue for that would be not enough bandwidth available or circuit errors.

If this is on a WAN circuit I would check bandwith usage during those times an or interface errors.

brian_duvall · Answer

Are you seeing any change in response times or drops during those periods of unknown snmp status on the interfaces?  Do you have a sniffer onsite or have wireshark loaded on your solarwinds box to verify that the snmp polls and responses are making it?  If you haven't tried that yet I would perform a sniff on the firewall and run wireshark on your solarwinds server to make sure which one is not doing its job.