Trap Director

[Anon Anon]

Hi,

 

We will shortly be enabling Trap director in a portion of our 9.4.2.1 environment, i have gone through the relevent documentation but i have one question about discovery.

 

In our set-up we will have trap director responsible for 2 landscapes (with HA enabled).  and as such all devices will only be configured for sending snmp communication to one IP address.

 

my question is:

 

How does this affect discovery on the landscape that is not running the trap director?  Am I correct in assuming that when we do a discovery on it it will sent the get request via the server with trap director enabled? or will it try to send out the initial discovery requests direct to the device?

 

It is worth mentioning that neither of these will be our MLS.

[Frank Tonjes]

Not sure what you are asking to be honest, but trap-director's function isn't to do auto-discovery. Trap director just forwards traps it receives to the appropriate landscape.

 

e.g. if you have 2 trap directors (primary and secondary), when a trap is received, the trapdirector will query the MLS if it doesn't know where to send the trap. if it knows or finds out it forwards that newly created event (Trap is converted to internal event) to the relevant landscape. That is the function of the Trap director. This is nice if you have more than one landscape. You can set for example all devices in your infrastructure to send traps to a primary and secondary trap director, and then you can move the device between landscapes without having to change the devices trap receiver config.

 

If you have too many traps, trap director can be problematic though.

 

If you are referring to trap-based discovery, if a trap is received which is not modelled and you specify it to model new devices, that model will be created on the landscape with TrapDirector enabled. It will discover it from the trapDirector landscape (i.e. the ping or snmp discovery will be generated from the trap-director landscape).

 

Hope this helps.

[Anon Anon]

I think that sorts of answers it, but to clarify the situations wil be as such:

 

Server A has trap director, and its IP is the one all network devices are configured to send and receive SNMP traps to,

 

Server B comes along to take some load of server A and generally provide expansion room, it as such sends all traps through Server A via trap director.

 

So if we were to add a new network device to server B (the network device being set to only allow snmp to server A) server b will send the initial request for discovery to server A (including icmp) which will then forward on the results.

 

Im sure this will be the case but just looking for some confirmation.

[Frank Tonjes]

Yes it does! That is Trap Directors job!

[GBPopular]

Hello!

From now we need to managing devices which are natted IP. The problems have started when we have tried to configure the traps. Obviously, we not have received correctly the traps from these devices.  The solution is manage the trap through the colector. I am reading the information about the Trap Director and it seems that is a software that comes with Spectrum software, isn't it?. It is very important understand that we are managing all devices in landscape without NAT(3.000 devices), and only we need the Trap Director for a few items (less than 10).

 

but honestly I cannot understand how it work?, how it install?,how it affect the other landscapes?. Really I not found a guide about this application. I read a C.A Information "Working with Trap Director" is not very extensive. If I have a Spectrum in Fault Tolerance and Distributed, and If I don’t want that change this infrastructure, I need to install another SpectroServer with TrapDirector, correct? Then I should integrate another landscape to the existing map. Shouldn´t I?

 

 We have got Spectrum distributed and fault tolerance, is it necessary install it in other server, or it could be installed in a one of the SpectroServer? We are managing the devices, its the TrapDirector used only for traps, or we need to rediscover the devices? Is there any guide to explain step by step how working the Trap Director?

 

Thank you!

 

Susana

[Frank Tonjes]

Trap Director is a feature you can enable on any Landscape server. This converts traps to events and then allows forwarding of these 'traps' to other landscapes automatically. It allows you to direct all traps to a host and lets Spectrum forward it on to which ever landscape has the device that trap is destined for.

 

You can enable it by going under the VNM model's Information tab, then navigating to 'Trap Management' and then enable 'Enable Trap Director' (on the top-right).

 

You can also set spectrum up to automatically model devices which it gets traps from (if it can communicate via the same SNMP community that the trap has!).

 

Working with Trap Director - CA Spectrum - 9.4.1 to 9.4.4 - CA Technologies Documentation 

 

This is for 9.4 but should be almost identical for 10.x

[GBPopular]

thank you frank
I really useful your information for me.

 

If I use the Trap Director, but my worried is about all others devices. I mean, I have more than 3.000 devices not NAT, which are sent traps to the same Landscape. What will happen if I activate Trap Director in this Landscape? Also the devices which we have this problem are being managed in the same landscape where we want to get the alarms.

 

I am not sure if it could be inadvisable

[Frank Tonjes]

This shouldn't be a problem. Trap will always be directed to devices with the same management IP of where the trap is coming from. As long as you don't have duplicate IP addresses on different landcapes this shouldn't be an issue. It's only when you have duplicate IP addresses that there may be issues as the Trapdirector would have more than one choice (potentially) to send a trap to.

[Veronique Lefebure]

Hi Frank,

What problem can we have if we have duplicated devices ? It seems to me that the trap creates en event on both models which have the same IP. thanks for confirming. Veronique