Hi David,
First off, please forgive me for copying my answer to you to the list, but this is a
very interesting question, and I can imagine the answer might be helpful for other
folks. Above and beyond that, maybe somebody else is already using the appender with
Tivoli and might be able to help as well.
You asked:
>> Are there any directions on the internet as to how to configure the
>SNMPTrapAppender?
I'm using it with log4j and am able to send traps to Tivoli. However, those traps are
interpreted as "invalid" traps.
I've consulted with our local SNMP guru and she claims the vendor needs to supply us
with a MIB in order for Tivoli to correctly intepret the trap.
Any comments deeply appreciated.<<
The trouble with this question is that the answer is entirely situation-dependent. By
that I mean this - whether or not you need a custom MIB for the application that you
want to send traps from depends entirely on the way things are done by the system
management folks at your organization. In that sense, your guru may well be right,
and if she is, then your situation is about as complicated as one can imagine it
being.
Before we delve into that, however, let me describe a simpler scenario. At one client
of mine that uses the appender, a huge bank, the systems folks are still in the
process of switching things slowly over to Tivoli. They're migrating from a Netview
environment, and since the environment is huge, and mind-bogglingly complex, that
process will take a good bit of time. In the meantime, Netview is still being used,
and as a result, I haven't had a need to deal directly with Tivoli yet.
In this customer's Netview environment, the systems troop made a deliberate decision
to avoid custom MIBs per managed application. That decision was made, in part,
because of the sheer number of bespoke applications that the bank wanted to monitor -
it was judged that such a quantity of custom MIBs (we're talking 10,000+ applications
here) would be unmanageable. A simpler route was taken.
Netview maintains a configuration file called "trapd.conf" on every MLM. With the
Netview command "addtrap" one can add entries to this file. Each entry corresponds to
the data one would find in a custom MIB for an application - enterprise OID, specific
trap ID and so on. The bank maintains an Oracle database with all of this data, from
which they can generate a script which allows them to spit out a copy of "trapd.conf".
When a new application needs to be monitored, one fills out a form provided by the
systems troop, and gets a new trap ID assigned in return. Armed with this data, it's
a simple matter to configure the trap appender. And since the corresponding data is
in the MLM's "trapd.conf", the Netview console immediately "recognizes" the traps the
appender is sending and everything is rosy.
The problem you're describing sounds to me like your shop's TEC is missing that sort
of corresponding information - the Tivoli analog to an entry in "trapd.conf" - and
thus, although the TEC receives the trap, is unable to "recognize" it.
If there's no possibility of using a "trapd.conf" sort of solution at your shop, and
your Tivoli people simply insist on a MIB, then you have a problem. The thing is, I
can't provide one for you, as part of the appender, because the contents of such a MIB
are, per definition, specific to your application. What I can do is this - I have a
fairly generic example of an application MIB that I got from the Net somewhere. I've
attached it to this mail. You would need to modify the contents to suit your app, and
then compile the result to obtain a MIB that you could then provide your Tivoli
people.
I have to tell you - I've never had to do this myself, so I can't be of much more help
than that, I'm afraid. Nor do I have a MIB compiler that I could give you. I wanted
to see if I could find a freely available one on the Net, but I've not had a chance,
and I didn't want to keep you waiting on an answer any longer. It shouldn't be too
hard to come up with such a thing however - a Google search should turn up something,
I would think.
Hope this helps. Please let me know how you get on - I'd be very interested to hear
how things turn out!
Cheers,
Mark
APPLICATION-MIB
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