Receiving SNMP Traps

WhatsUp Gold has an internal SNMP trap handler, which when enabled, listens for and accepts SNMP traps that are addressed to it. 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. If this is not selected, ONLY traps which are specifically added to devices as events are logged to the activity log and are able to trigger alerts. You may prefer to select this option so that ALL traps which occur are able to be detected and logged to the activity log. Note that regardless of this filter setting, traps are logged to the SNMP Trap Log. By default there is no strict filtering of traps; this way you can see all traps from all sources, then make decisions about creating Actions based on specific traps you have seen. Later you may make the decision to filter out all traps except those you expect to see.
      • 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, you need to turn off the SNMP trap service.

Related Topics Common SNMP Traps About Passive Monitors