SNMP Monitoring

SNMP Network Monitoring

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a widely used UDP-based network protocol for various types of devices to communicate with each other. Most operating systems, routers, and high-end business applications (databases and so on...) provide an SNMP interface into their products for external products to communicate with. Its components typically include a manager and an agent. The SNMP agents run on each device which has to be managed and provide information regarding the devices. This information is hard to comprehend in its native form, and that's where MIB files come in. These files provide a structure to read the SNMP-related information sent out by agents for each particular device. AppPerfect's Network Monitoring Services help you to monitor network devices like firewalls, routers, UPS, Printers, Operating Systems, Application servers, Web Services, DNS and so on, that can communicate with the SNMP protocol.


SNMP Network Monitoring with AppPerfect

AppPerfect offers SNMP Network Monitoring solution in the form of AppPerfect Agentless Monitor. AppPerfect's SNMP Monitor implements SNMP protocol to monitor most devices that support SNMP. It can monitor network devices where SNMP agents are running. It uses MIB files that you have to provide for each device you wish to monitor and provides you with and easy-to-use tree structure from where you can select the attributes you would like to monitor.
AppPerfect's SNMP Network Monitoring is the ideal solution to monitor your network devices. AppPerfect's SNMP Network Monitoring is found to be most efficient, reliable and accurate solution by its customers. Regular agents impose a substantial overhead on your server resources in terms of CPU and memory. By contrast, AppPerfect's SNMP Network Monitoring solution implements Agentless Architecture and uses existing SNMP agents and services to extract required monitoring information. SNMP Network Monitoring with AppPerfect is extremely lightweight and adds negligible overhead to target device while monitoring.

Setting up the SNMP Server

  1. Enable SNMP Server before starting SNMP service.
    To enable SNMP server, Go to -> /etc/hostconfig file, add "SNMPSERVER:=-YES-"
  2. Configuration settings in /etc/snmp.conf (optional)- To run the server in debug mode, Uncomment : dodebugging 0
    • Configuration settings in /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf:
    • - Change network and community token to reflect your local network address space.
    • - Give read write permissions to the network. The default permission is read.
    • - Map the security names into group names, uncomment the groups ( group MyRWGroup v1 local )
    • - Uncomment the following samples:
      # exec .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.51 ps /bin/ps
      # exec .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.52 top /usr/local/bin/top
      # exec .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.53 mailq /usr/bin/mailq

The following points define how the AppPerfect SNMP Monitor works:

  • First of all,
  • SNMP agents must be deployed and running on the servers / devices that you wish to monitor. You can start SNMP server using the command -> sudo /usr/sbin/snmpd
  • You must provide the MIB file for each SNMP device that you wish to monitor. This is done at the time of creating the SNMP monitor. (Requires administrator rights.) An MIB or Management Information Base file consists of a collection of objects organized into groups. An MIB is not a database or data store, it is just a logical grouping of data so that it is easily understood by all.
  • The AppPerfect SNMP monitor fetches data from the SNMP agent using UDP. The MIB file allows the SNMP monitor to present the attributes to you in an easy-to-use tree structure.
  • You can select the attributes you wish to monitor from this list instead of having to go through each MIB file yourself.

Configuring Agentless Monitor to monitor SNMP

Following steps will explain how you can configure AppPerfect for SNMP Network Monitoring :

  1. Once you are logged into the Monitor Server you can see the Web-UI from which you can access all the features of the Monitor Server. Click the Monitors link from the top navigation bar. This will take you to Monitors tab. Click on Add button to Add a New SNMP Monitor.
  2. Next Step is to define the SNMP Monitor. Provide the IP Address or Host Name of the target machine where SNMP service is running.
  3. Select the SNMP Monitor Type from the drop down. Specify a meaningful identifier for the monitor which will help identify the monitor in future.
  4. Specify the Data Fetch Interval which represents the time interval for which application should wait before fetching the monitoring data from the device. Monitoring Data will be fetched after every specified fetch interval. The smaller the time interval, the more granular the data. However, smaller time intervals also result in a much larger data set.
  5. You can specify if the monitor should be Active as soon as its added or should it be in suspended state.
  6. Next Option is to provide SNMP Agent configuration details. Specify the Read Community to get read-only access to the SNMP agent. This is part of the SNMP authentication mechanism. Select the SNMP protocol version which is the version of SNMP agent, which could by any of v1, v2 or v3. Specify the port number on which the SNMP agent is listening. This is the SNMP standard port. If the SNMP agent you want to monitor is running on any other port than 161, then you have to specify that port number here. Also you need to specify the MIB file for adding the SNMP monitor. This file stores information about the SNMP monitor you want to monitor, for instance, you will have MIB files for Weblogic, Oracle, Host machine and so on. This file is mandatory and once defined it cannot be changed. In case of SNMP v3, you also need to provide the authentication and privacy credentials. Once you are done providing the SNMP settings, click on Validate Connection button to confirm that SNMP agent is accessible.

    SNMP Network Monitoring : Add Monitor
  7. Next Step is to select the Attributes to monitor. Select the parameters you need to monitor from the list of attributes shown. The list contains the collection of attributes which can be monitored and are documented in the MIB file.

    SNMP Network Monitoring : Select Attributes
  8. Next step shows the Attribute details of all the selected attributes in the previous step. You can customize the display labels for each of the attributes here.

    SNMP Network Monitoring : Attribute Details
  9. Next step shows the Attribute Data conversion where you can convert the attribute value to required unit. You can configure the operation which should be performed on the attribute value to create the final output value.

    SNMP Network Monitoring : Attribute Data Conversion
  10. Next step shows the Defining Rules view. This view will provide a list of all numeric attributes. You can select the attributes for which you want to add a rule. A rule is defined as a conditional or threshold value which when exceeds, a notification would be sent. In a typical workflow the monitors extract data from the monitored device and send it to the rules engine. The rules engine evaluates the data to ensure no rule is violated and then sends it to the view manager. However, if a rule is violated, a message is immediately sent to the notification server to alert the user about the rule violation.Rules can be defined at a later stage as well. For details on how you can add/edit rules for the monitor, please see the Rules chapter.
  11. Next step shows the Security & Notification settings. When a rule is violated a notification is sent out to all the concerned users that a particular event has occurred and needs to be dealt with. This process is called notification. AppPerfect provides five modes of notification. They are Email notification, SMS notification, Custom notification, Log notification, Database notification, SNMP Trap notification. For details on each of the supported notification , please see the Notification chapter. In this view you can configure the type of notification which should be sent on Rule violation, Users/Groups to whom notification should be sent and also the subject and details on the notification message.
  12. Click on finish button. We are done adding the monitor for SNMP device. You will find the newly added monitor on left hand side Monitor tree. Select the Monitor and on right hand side you can view the detailed results for each of the attributes being monitored for the target device.

    SNMP Network Monitoring Results
Conclusion :

AppPerfect's SNMP Monitor implements SNMP protocol to monitor most devices that support SNMP. It can monitor network devices where SNMP agents are running. It uses MIB files that you have to provide for each device you wish to monitor and provides you with and easy-to-use tree structure from where you can select the attributes you would like to monitor. AppPerfect's SNMP Network Monitoring solution is platform independent. AppPerfect Agentless Monitor is found to be most efficient, reliable and accurate Monitoring solution by its customers. In case you have not yet tried AppPerfect Agentless Monitor, Download Now and give it a try today.

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