Checking Device Compatibility and Troubleshooting With UDT Compatibility Checker

caneruguz over 3 years ago 3 minute read time

One of the common questions you may have about Solarwinds® User Device Tracker (UDT) is whether your devices will be supported. With many monitoring or tracking tools, this is a very straightforward question. However, for UDT, it depends less on the actual device vendor than the implementation of SNMP on the device.

To make the task of evaluating your environment easier, UDT comes with a handy utility called UDT Device Compatibility Checker. This utility comes with the UDT download. You can find details on how to use it here: https://support.solarwinds.com/SuccessCenter/s/article/UDT-Compatibility-Checker?language=en_US

Before we get further into using this cool tool, it’s important to understand why UDT works this way. UDT uses SNMP, which is short for Simple Network Management Protocol. Devices on your network like routers, switches, bridges, etc., will use this protocol. This is currently a very widely used protocol in networking environments, but devices don’t have the same information in them. Depending on their functionality, devices will have different types of information available. This information is organized as objects with unique IDs, which are called Object IDs or OIDs. The kind of data UDT can show is more of an aspect of what types of objects are available in the device than the vendor itself. If you’d like to find out more about how SNMP, OIDs, and MIBs work, check out these resources:

https://www.dnsstuff.com/network-monitoring#general-monitoring-techniques-protocols

https://www.dnsstuff.com/snmp-traps-explained-how-to-view

https://www.dnsstuff.com/mib-browsers

In our documentation, we provide the OIDs UDT requires to work on this page: https://documentation.solarwinds.com/en/success_center/udt/content/udt-snmp-requirements-for-monitored-devices.htm

However, unless you spend a lot of time in SNMP world, this list will likely not help you understand more about your compatibility. This is where the compatibility checker becomes handy. You can run it in your own environment and with existing nodes in your Orion^® Platform installation to preview what data can be returned with UDT polling. This will show the type of information received and details about the retrieval process as well as any errors that may have happened. Compatibility Checker can also use ICMP and WMI polling methods if you aren’t using SNMP.

Compatibility checker can be useful for other scenarios as well, especially when you see issues with your UDT polling. You can think of this tool as a first aid kit for you to diagnose your environment for polling issues. If you open a support ticket, our team will likely also be using this compatibility checker as a first step to find out more about what’s happening, but you can read and act on the information provided as well.

One common scenario is when SNMPv3 not working with user environments. If the Compatibility Checker is showing 31016 Authorization Error, for example, there are steps you can take to solve your problem as described here: https://support.solarwinds.com/SuccessCenter/s/article/Enable-SNMPv3-access-for-layer-2-3-Bridge-MIBs-for-Cisco-IOS?language=en_US

One of the most useful sections in the tool is the Session Properties on the left panel. You can drag and change the size of this panel to see more of the content. You can also see the node information and ports, which provide a lot of details available to UDT, including endpoint information with MAC addresses. Ports that are up will have a [Up | X] next to their name showing the number of endpoints we see. If the port is up but you don’t see any endpoints, your device may be missing SNMP data.

For even more detailed polling troubleshooting, you can follow the Live Log. Start it by clicking on the Live Log button in the compatibility checker. A new window will show you the live output, which you can pause and save into a file to send it to support or team members for further diagnosis. You can save this as a file or copy paste the contents.

Compatibility checker should be only used occasionally, but sometimes similar situations arise where you may need to run it again with the same nodes. You can save your session information for this purpose and load it instead of starting new session.

If you’re a current client and having issues with UDT, it’s a good idea to run compatibility checker before you contact support and save the session and live log information. If you have issues with slow polling, it’s even more important to do this ahead of time since it will speed up the time to resolve the issue when you have these diagnostics ready.

Let us know what you think about this utility we provide with User Device Tracker. If you’ve used it and have some ideas about how we can improve it and make it more useful, please add your thoughts as well.