Alerting - SNMP Traps

Overview

Alerts can send SNMP traps to other systems and management platforms. Typically these systems will be high-level managers, or alert aggregators, and you will only be setting up this type of alerting if you are an administrator or engineer responsible for interconnecting a number of separate platforms.

SNMP traps are simple, immediate datagrams and can be sent when any metric on which Highlight is reporting exceeds a threshold.

Alert Setup

In the Edit Alert dialog box (example below) two specific fields for setting up SNMP trap alerts are:

Method: SNMP Trap

Send to: the DNS name or externally-visible IP address of the SNMP trap receiver of the management platform (required field)

Refer to the alerting page for details on all other fields in the create/edit dialog.

Notes

Highlight uses a default community string of “highlight” which is sent as part of the trap. There is no ability to change this when setting up a trap alert.

The source IP of the trap is determined by the Highlight system you logon to. Therefore it will be the IP address associated with DNS name system.highlighter.net where system is usually the name of your service provider.

SNMP Trap MIB

Traps are sent based on the Highlight Trap MIB (HIGHLIGHT-TRAP-MIB), the latest version of which is available via email from Highlight Support. Traps contain the following information:

Information	Format	Details
Watch ID	Number	Highlight’s ID number for the Watch which generated the alert
Watch Name	String	The short name (reference, mnemonic etc.) for the Watch
Folder Name	String	The name of the folder containing the Watch
Location Name	String	The name of the location containing the Watch
Level 3 metric	Number	Stability, Load or Health
Level 2 metric	Number	A reference for the element causing the alert, e.g. LinkStability
Metric value	Number	Current value of the level 2 metric, as a percentage
Fuel-gauge value	Number	Current value of the fuel-gauge which triggered the event
Description	String	Text description of the broken metric
Timestamp UTC	String	The UTC time at which the alert was raised
Timestamp local	String	The local time at which the alert was raised
Reporting Device	IP Address	The IP Address the trap came from
Switch critical port slot**	Number	The slot of the port if a critical port switch event
Switch critical port**	Number	The port if a critical port switch event

**Optional OID only added to the trap if it's a switch critical port alert

You will need to load or install this MIB into your management platform (the application which receives traps).