DPS Telecom Your Partners in Network Alarm Management Techno Knowledge Paper Using T/Mon s SNMP Trap Log This document is intended to teach you everything you will need to know about the specific traps coming to your T/Mon and viewing them in the Traplog. If you do not have the SNMP processor set up on the T/Mon yet please view our Techno Knowledge pager titled Setup_SNMP_Trap_Processor. If you are having trouble receiving alarms from your SNMP device or are receiving errors in your trap log then follow the steps below to help find out why. If this document does not have what you are looking for please refer to these other technoknowledge papers dealing with SNMP. They can be found by clicking the following link: www.dpstele.com/white-papers Practical Guide to SNMP Troubleshooting http://www.dpstele.com/white-papers/snmp_troubleshooting/offer.php The Fast Track Introduction to SNMP Alarm Monitoring http://www.dpstele.com/white-papers/snmp-tutorial/ How to Read and Understand the SNMP MIB http://www.dpstele.com/white-papers/snmp-mib/ Troubleshooting Checklist 1. To start working with the T/Mon Trap log make sure that your Trap log is set to record any SNMP activity that is being sent to the T/Mon. This is done from the Parameters option in the master menu. You will then choose Remote Ports. If you just want to get an idea of how the trap is formatted and what information you will need to provision your alarm point you can skip down to step #7 after turning setting the Log Activity to Yes. ***Once done troubleshooting, make sure you turn this option back to No, because this file stores a lot of information and can fill up quickly.***
2. Hit F1 to go to the remote device definition screen. 2. If you are unsure what SNMP version to use open your MIB on your computer by right clicking it and open as a text file. Each SNMP version, whether it is V1, V2C, or V2C- Inform, uses different verbiage. If you search the MIB and find the term Trap-Type then you are dealing with SNMP V1. If you search and find Notification-Type then you are using SNMP V2C, and the term Inform-Type deals with V2C-Inform. By doing a search (ctrl+f) for the term Trap-Type the fact that many items were found shows that we are dealing with an SNMP V1 Trap. 3. Hit F1 again to go to the point definition screen where you will specify individual alarm points for that particular MIB. Keep in mind when creating each alarm point we will need to create a trap for both a fail condition and also a clear condition. Hitting F1 when your cursor is on the fail condition does this. The following examples will pertain to setting up a trap for a Side Panel fail alarm.
4. After hitting F1 when your cursor is under the Fail column you will be on the MIB line to choose the MIB associated with this trap, hit the tab key and then scroll up and down to make your selection. Hit enter to choose the MIB and wait a second for the cursor to move to the next line to choose the correct trap that is being used. You can see below that this is a small MIB and there is only 1 trap to choose from and 3 Reference OID s to choose from. 5. The MIB, Trap, and Reference OID s basically create a key for the T/Mon. Each key is unique for each alarm point. Once a trap is sent that matches all of the specification in your key an alarm will be created. Keep in mind that you only need to be as specific as possible where the
T/Mon can create a match that will be unique for that particular alarm point. The following picture is an example of this. We will talk about the OID circled in red later on in the document. 6. Hit F8 to save and then enter in the information in the same way for the clear condition. Notice in the example below that the fail and clear conditions can be given specific indications like OPEN, CLOSE, and LOW OIL or whatever will be clearest for you in the event of this alarm. 7. After this information is entered and your device sends a trap it should be sent to the window that you specified in the point definition screen. If this does not happen we need to find out some more information about the device sending the traps. Start by putting the T/Mon in Monitor mode and trigger a few alarms from your SNMP device so that we can see the structure of the traps coming in and see how these match up to the MIB that we compiled in the T/Mon. This information can be found in the trap log we turned on in step one. To find where the trap log is stored go to Files, Utilities, Report Maintenance, and then hit tab to choose TRAPLOG. You can also copy this file to a disk to open on your PC using either WordPad or Notepad (Notepad was used in this example) for easy visibility and to keep your T/Mon monitoring while you research the problem. To copy the traplog you can either use your ftp server (section M15-1 of the T/Mon user manual) or simply copy it to a 3-½ floppy disk (option available by choosing
Copy Report File from the Report Maintenance window). When you open up your traplog you will see something like the picture below. There is a lot of good information that we can gather from the traplog. For starters we can see at the top left the IP address of our source sending the traps along with the port that it is sending them. The three red arrows show us our variable bindings (Reference OID s) and the position that corresponds to them is circled. We can also see the value of each trap, which can be either a numeric or character value. In the example above it is the word SIDE PANEL in the red box. Lastly you can see the Trap OID underlined and more importantly the phrase Master Key NOT Found (problem with variable bindings). This tells us that something is either missing or incorrect in our Trap setup in the Trap Association Screen. Remember that in this example a trap was not created successfully because the key that we created in steps 4 and 5 when defining the alarm point did not match the key (variable bindings, values, and positions) being sent in the trap. 8. To fix this problem we will try to enter the Tap OID s in manually by choosing Manual Mode for the MIB. We will also be entering the Reference OID s in manually so you will need a copy
of the trap log when doing this. The example below shows the same example that we used in the beginning only this time the OID s were entered in manually. You should now see in your trap log a message similar to this one. 9. In conclusion, you don t necessarily have to go through each of these steps to receive a trap on the T/Mon. If you want you can turn the trap log on like in step one, send multiple traps to the T/Mon, and then view the trap log to see what type of key you will need to create in your point definition screen. Once you have an idea of what to look for you can send multiple traps to the trap log and database your alarm points much faster. Happy Trapping! However if you find yourself getting stuck or are not receiving messages like those in the example above, please contact DPS Technical support @ 1-800-622-3314.