Monitor a SNMP Device using MonitorWare Agent
Article created 2008-02-26 by Andre Lorbach.
This article will help you to monitor SNMP capable devices using the new SNMP
Monitor Service of MonitorWare Agent. There are many devices out there which
support SNMP, and can also be queried for information's using SNMP GET. We will
use SNMP GET to monitor a device, if we get a respond, the device is most likely
running. If we do not get a response, the device may be offline or is powered
off. We will use the Send Email Action to generate Alert Emails in case of that
a monitored device is not responding anymore.
- You can
download a preconfigured configuration from here, which you can import
on your target system. The configuration sample will have comments for
better understanding. The MonitorWare Agent Client can
import the XML/REG configuration file by using the "Computer Menu".
As I said earlier there are many devices out there which do support SNMP like
printers, routers, managed switches, linux / windows server and so on. In this
article I will show you how to setup the SNMP Monitor Service to monitor a
HP LaserJet 4000 laser printer.
1. SNMP Device (Printer) Setup
1.1 Configuring the Printer
2. Configuring MonitorWare Agent
2.1 Download and
Install MonitorWare Agent
2.2 Setup Basics in
MonitorWare Agent
2.3 Create a Forwarding Rule for the InterActive SyslogViewer (Optional!)
2.4 Create an Email alert
2.5 Configure Filters for
the Email Alert
Final Thoughts
 As far as I know this printer does not need any special setting to have SNMP
support enabled. So by default SNMP is enabled, and it is possible to overwrite
the used snmp community name. However for this article I will not modify this
setting.
The only thing we will need for this device is it's IP Address which is
172.16.0.15.
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So if you haven't done so already, go to
www.mwagent.com and download
the latest MonitorWare Agent Version. It is always recommended to use the latest
Version of MonitorWare Agent. Once the Download is done, go ahead and install
it. You may have to restart after installation, this depends on your System.
(This article will only work with MonitorWare Agent 5.2 or higher).
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 Start the MonitorWare Agent Client and skip the wizard on startup. First we
create new "SNMP Monitor" Service by right clicking the
Configured Services node and going to the Add Service menu.
Insert the IP of the device you want to monitor in the remote host field. You
can leave the default values for the other configuration options, they will work
fine for most devices.
The Query OID I use in this sample will query the system name of the device.
However there are several other variables you pick for monitoring such as:
- .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.6 (i.o.d.i.mgmt.mib-2.system.sysLocation)
- .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.5 (i.o.d.i.mgmt.mib-2.system.sysName)
- .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.4 (i.o.d.i.mgmt.mib-2.system.sysContact)
- .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.3 (i.o.d.i.mgmt.mib-2.system.sysUpTime)
- .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.2 (i.o.d.i.mgmt.mib-2.system.sysObjectID)
- .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1 (i.o.d.i.mgmt.mib-2.system.sysDescr)
Other OID's might also be available, it depends on device you are monitoring.
There is also a Instance subidentifier option available. I recommend to leave
this value to 0, it is only useful if you want to query a OID which contains
multiple data.
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 This
is an optional step, only useful for testing and debugging the SNMP Monitor. You
can disable the Action of this rule later if you want. As we are using the UDP
protocol to forward syslog messages locally, it doesn't really matter.
So first of all create a new Rule called "FwSyslog" and add a new
Forward Syslog Action. The Syslog Server is 127.0.0.1 and the syslog
port is 10514. See the screenshot for more details.
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The best option to get alerted is by email. So we create another rule called
EmailAlert and add a Forward Email Action. Please fill Sender, Recipient and
Mailserver configuration yourself.
Use the following text as mail subject:
Use the following text as message format:
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 We
were not finished yet ;). We need to configure some filters, otherwise you would
get one Email for each SNMP Monitor check, even if successfully.
So add a new Custom Property filter, with the property name "%snmp_status%". Use
the compare operation "not equal" and Property Valur of "0". So this means the
Actions in this rule will be fired whenever the status is not 0, and every
status which is not 0 means there was an error.
To avoid email flooding, set the Minimum WaitTime to 600 seconds. This means it
doesn't matter how failures are generated, in 10 minutes there will only be one
email alert.
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I hope this article will help you solving your tasks or shows you the
potential of MonitorWare Agent, and what you can archive with it. Feel free to
email me for recommendations or questions. Of course, the outlined actions are
only samples and you may do other things with them, for example store log
records to a database table instead of storing them to file.
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