Trap Override Intro

Author: David McGee

Trap overrides are put in place to manually override the severity of an active alarm. By default, informational alarms are not ticketed. Begin by selecting a particular MIB. This will then populate the next step which is to filter for text or to select a trap from the Trap Select dropdown menu.

A number of common severities exist in the IDMS SNMP Manager. The standard conventions usually follow: Informational, Warning, Minor, Major, Critical. The idea behind these severities is to categorise the priority of an alarm. Using trap override functionality, our customers can setup the SNMP Manager to react differently to certain alarms on noisy networks.

As an exercise, you should check out the Trap Knowledge over-ride configurations (Using the trap_knowledge table) on the QA systems for ExteNet Systems. Please exercise caution and consult a colleague before doing so. Identify a number of trap overrides that are currently in place.

In layman's terms, the functionality operates as follows:

For <Trap X> received from <Vendor Y> (Using MIB), over-ride the severity to be <Severity Z>

Examples of Trap Override scenarios/rules could include:

• For fanAlarm SNMP traps received from Mobile Access (MA_EVENTS_MIB), set the severity to be INFORMATIONAL instead of MAJOR
• For doorOpen SNMP traps received from BTI (BTI_MIB), set the severity to be WARNING instead of MINOR
• For voltageLow SNMP traps received from VoltServer (VOLTSERVE_MGT100_MIB), set the severity to be INFORMATIONAL instead of CRITICAL.