To what extent MonitorWare Agent 4.x / WinSyslog 7.x Support SNMP?

To what extent MonitorWare Agent 4.x / WinSyslog 7.x Support SNMP?

Created 2007-01-30 by Florian Riedl.

I am using MonitorWare Agent 4.x / WinSyslog 7.x on my NT Server. To what extent MonitorWare Agent 4.x / WinSyslog 7.x Support SNMP?

MonitorWare Agent and WinSyslog are capable of either sending or receiving SNMP Traps. Usually SNMP Traps are used by network devices to report status messages to the managing system. Our products can play either role. They are fully compatible to SNMP v1 and v2c and provide you full enterprise support.

Managing incoming Traps works the same way as with a Syslog server for example. Incoming Traps will be forwarded to the corresponding Ruleset and pass by rule after rule. There it can be filtered for general information like the “Community”, the “Version” or “Value” for example. Finally it will be processed by an action, which you can select to your needs. The SNMP Agent service will co-exist peacefully next to the Windows SNMP Agent and will not hinder it in it’s functionality. The Windows SNMP Agent listens to port 161, while MonitorWare Agent and WinSyslog listen to port 162.

The “Send SNMP Trap”-Action is capable of sending all kinds of Traps. You can choose the whole variety of the MonitorWare Products’ Properties as a value for the messages. With that, you can send SNMP Traps to the Windows internal SNMP Agent or any other device that is able to receive SNMP Traps. Of course you have full enterprise support, too. This gives you the possibility to involve every machine on your network into your security plan or whatever purpose it should serve.

For internal processing, the variables of incoming SNMP messages will be added to a new property. Those properties will be named %snmp_var_x% with the x being a number starting with 1. You can use these custom properties for filtering and everywhere you can use or print properties. For example, you can create a “send mail”-action. Here you can specify complete freely how the message will look like. You can use a introductory text and then let it show the error message in some context. This could look like this:

The result will be, that the 5th property of the snmp trap will be inserted into the message text.

This gives you an overall solution for receiving and sending SNMP Traps. You can create some kind of relay point, or just do some logging for later analysis. While the first versions of our software with SNMP compatibility had just basic features which were targeted towards SOHO devices. Later, enterprise customers asked for SNMP functionalities, which caused us to create a full-blown SNMP implementation with enterprise-class support.

If you need further information about the SNMP implementation, send a mail to our Support.