Setting up SNMP Monitoring in SCOM 2012 (Part - 2)

**Update, Oct. 30th, 2013. Recently, I have been successfully deploying SCOM without having to also install the native SNMP options in Windows. However, the screens I normally use to validate that SNMP is working did not function correctly. While I was able to generate alerts, the event captures that I show on the last step of this post did NOT function. So, until I am able to get all the features working as I'd like, the steps in this post provide maximum flexibility in SNMP monitoring. I hope, in the future, to perform a side-by-side comparison of what works and does not work based on your installation type. So, you could skip to Step 8 in this guide if you are so inclined and proceed through step 15, but the validation steps after that will likely not work properly.

If you have landed on this page, you are lkely interested in setting up SNMP monitoring for System Center Operations Manager 2012 and have probably been frustrated with the lack of consolidated information or even outdated information found on the Internet. Prepare for a quick and accurate guide to get you trapping SNMP events in no time! I have labeled this Part-2, though there is no Part-1 just yet. I presume that you have taken steps to already discover devices in SNMP and now want to start seeing what type of traps are being generated from those systems. If you haven't been that far yet, let me know and I will post some resources.

First thing is first, despite what you may have read up until now, you still need to have the SNMP service running on the management server that is receiving the traps, do not disable the SNMP service. The TRAP service should be installed but turned off. This contradicts almost every other blog out there but we could not get traps coming in until we turned the service back on, period. Try the enclosed methods first and if you want to toy around, go from there, but I cannot guarantee that you'll be able to get traps if you disable both services. Additionally, to test traps, we setup a basic CentOS system running SNMP. We added the device to SCOM under networking devices. We did not install the LINUX agent.

1. Open up the Windows Server Manager, then select Features and on right, select "Add Features"

2. Select SNMP Service along with SNMP WMI Provider, you will have to expand to in order to select that additional component.

3. Select "Install" and wait for the installation to complete.

4. Open services.msc via the run prompt, or through the server manager. Scroll down until you see the SNMP services. Disable the SNMP Trap service as shown.

5. Double-click the "SNMP Service" to open the property settings.

6. In the SNMP Services Properties window, select the option to "Accept SNMP packets from any host" and then input a community name, such as "public".

7. Open the Operations Managre console, select Authoring and then rules. Right-click on Rules in order to create a new rule

8. In the initial Create Rule Wizard, expand "Collection rules"->"Event based" and select the "SNMP Trap (Event)".

9. Select to view all targets, then look for node type.

10. Your rule should look like this now, a rule name that you have provided, the category of "event collection" and a rule target of "Node".

11. For now, you have to input an OID as the screen will not take a blank OID. The one below is generic and can be used for now (1.2.3.4.0).

12. Go back to the authoring screen and change the scope to Node so that you can find the newly created rule more easily.

13. Right-click and select properties or double-click the new rule you just created.

14. Under the "Data sources" option, select "Edit".

15. Now clear the previously entered OID and select OK.

16. Now navigate to the "Monitoring" screen in the Operations Manager Console. Let's create a folder to group our SNMP alerts and collections to make them easy to find. Right-click the top tree labeled "Monitoring" and select "New -> Folder".

17. Select the newly created folder and lets add a new event view to that folder.

18. Narrow the scope to show data related to "Node" objects.

19. For your "Select conditions" show information generated by rules and select the new rule that was created earlier.

20. Now, generate a trap. In this case, we're using CentOS 6.2 to generate a simple version 2c SNMP trap to send to the SCOM server.

21. If all is well, you should see those traps show up in the SNMP event window.

If you do not see SNMP events showing up, then it is likely your local SNMP service is not functioning correctly or needs to be reinstalled. I will add a couple of great troubleshooting blogs in a few days.