Infra
Sensors
Uptrends Infra includes full support for SNMP monitoring, and makes it easy for you to retrieve data through SNMP directly. By continuously collecting data from your devices, you can start to see trends that were previously difficult to detect. Just like any other type of sensor available in Uptrends Infra, SNMP sensor data will be displayed in interactive dashboards that you can use to analyse the behavior of your device, and react to unexpected situations quickly.
SNMP explained
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a protocol for collecting management data from devices that are connected to a network. This management data can include operational status information, performance data and other metrics specific to the function of a particular device. SNMP is often the only way to retrieve information about the behavior of a device, without resorting to proprietary vendor software and drivers. Vendor-specific software may be difficult to install and usually doesn’t offer a way to actively monitor that data.
Monitor network devices and more
Let’s look at an example: Your router or hardware firewall provides a way to inspect network bandwidth usage. That data is usually available through a proprietary web page that is built into the router. While it’s easy to access that on an ad-hoc basis, it is rather difficult to actively monitor and collect long-term data, and detect unexpected conditions such as a sudden increase or unusual drop in network traffic.
Fortunately, most routers and other networking devices support SNMP. When you use Uptrends Infra’s SNMP monitoring tools to pull that data from your device, suddenly you have all of the rich monitoring, reporting and alerting capabilities at your disposal; even for the most detailed measurements like your router’s CPU and memory usage, device temperature, traffic data per port, and so on.
Configuring SNMP without programming
The best thing about the SNMP sensor type is that the configuration is so straightforward. You can set up the SNMP-based monitoring and alerting without any programming skills; the only thing you need to do, is specify which kind of SNMP data you want to look at, by entering the appropriate Object Identifier: the OID. OIDs are specific for the device’s brand and type, and a device typically has hundreds of different ones: each OID represents a particular metric reported by the device.
For example, a router might have a specific OID for exposing its CPU load, or its overall network usage; a server might expose the number of processes that are currently running. Using SNMP, you can even retrieve your printer’s toner levels or number of printed pages.
Object Identifiers
The OIDs are determined by the device’s manufacturer, and most hardware manufacturers publish the OIDs in their documentation and in library files called MIBs: Management Information Bases. Alternatively, there are several websites that let you search for your particular device and browse through all the available SNMP information. OIDs consist of a string of numbers, separated by dots. Typically, an OID looks like this: 1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1.0. Once you have the appropriate OID, simply paste it in your sensor settings to start monitoring.
SNMP traps by setting alert conditions
SNMP traps are part of the protocol to detect events and unexpected situations based on the raw SNMP data, but you need to run your own tools or programming code to respond to SNMP traps. However, with Uptrends Infra you can easily set up threshold values to control warning and error conditions. When a threshold value is exceeded, our software will generate a warning or error for the device. Using the extensive alerting capabilities, you can then control how quickly you want to be notified of these warning or error conditions. Essentially, this allows you to set up SNMP traps without any programming at all.
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