Receiving SNMP traps

WhatsUp Gold has an internal SNMP trap handler, which when enabled, listens for and accepts SNMP traps. WhatsUp Gold records the trap in the device's SNMP Trap Log.

You can also set up WhatsUp Gold to fire an Action when a trap is received for a device. For more information, see Using the Trap Definition Import Tool.

To configure WhatsUp Gold to receive traps:

  1. On the devices that will be monitored, set the SNMP agent to send traps to WhatsUp Gold. Trap manager addresses must be set on each physical device. This cannot be done from WhatsUp Gold.
  2. Set up the MIB entries for traps by placing the MIB text file in the C:\Program Files\Ipswitch\WhatsUp\Data\Mibs directory.
  3. Enable the SNMP Trap Handler.
    1. From the WhatsUp Gold console, select Configure > Program Options.
    2. Select Passive Monitor Listeners.
    3. Select SNMP Trap.
    4. Click the Configure button.
    5. Select the appropriate options.
      • Listen for messages on port. Select this option if you want WhatsUp Gold to listen for SNMP traps. The standard SNMP trap Port is 162, but you can change this port to a non-standard number. The changes are immediate, and you do not have to restart WhatsUp Gold for the changes to be in effect.
      • Accept unsolicited SNMP traps. Select this option to receive and log all incoming SNMP traps, including those not assigned to devices as passive monitors. By default, only SNMP traps assigned to devices as passive monitors are logged and can trigger actions. Incoming traps received as unsolicited traps are logged to the System SNMP Trap Log.

        Caution: When Accept unsolicited SNMP traps is enabled, every SNMP trap that is received by WhatsUp Gold is logged to the database. Since leaving this option enabled can result in a large database that impacts performance, we strongly advise you to leave this option disabled except when troubleshooting.

        Note: To configure SNMP traps initially, we recommend enabling the Any SNMP trap on the source device; you can then see all incoming traps sent from that device in the Device SNMP Trap Log. After you configure the trap successfully, remember to disable the Any trap, as it may also log large amounts of data.

      • Forward traps. Select this option to forward traps to IP addresses added to the Forward traps to list.
      • Forward unsolicited traps. Select this option to forward all traps, including unsolicited traps.
      • Forward traps to. Click Add to add an IP address and port to forward traps to. You can forward traps to multiple IP addresses.
    6. Click OK to save changes.

Note: If the SNMP agent is installed on the WhatsUp Gold machine, this will also start an SNMP trap service. This can result in a port conflict, because both the SNMP trap service and the WhatsUp Gold SNMP trap handler listen on port 162. To fix this, turn off the SNMP trap service.

Related Topics

Common SNMP Traps

About Passive Monitors