Sometimes you will need to forward a trap to multiple hosts. This is very easy to do with Trap Manager. You can configure it through the OidView UI.

You can do this on a global or a per-filter level.

Global Forwarding (forward all traps that come in):

1. Start OidView and make sure it is connected to Trap Manager Service (TMS) by looking at the lower right hand corner for the green light.

2. Once OidView is connected go to Tools -> Options -> Trap Manager -> Forwarding -> Forward IP Address or Hostname. Specify the hosts using IP addresses or hostnames, with “,” in between each one.3. Then, to turn on forwarding, MAKE SURE the “Forward Traps” option is checked!

Per Filter Forwarding (forward traps that match a certain filter):

1. Right-click on the Trap, and click “Modify Filter”.

2. Once in the filter, click the “Forwarding” checkbox, and click the button to enter the hosts.

3. Enter up to four hosts to forward the trap to.

How To, IT Management, Network Monitoring, SNMP Fowarding, SNMP, Trap Manager

The top IT management vendors have their work cut out for them. They need to convince you to spend big dollars for big legacy frameworks that usually do not deliver. Their sales people need to bring in multi-million dollar quotas each quarter and your specific needs are not on the top of their list. Very often you are sold something wasn’t even what you really needed, or in some cases, a solution that doesn’t even work.

The obvious alternatives are open-source, “off-the-shelf” products, and point-solutions.

Problems with these alternatives are plenty though. First, let’s consider open-source. Your IT department will probably end up paying more for your employees to do the extra development and “configuration” than if you just had purchased a high-cost product from the start. It is all too easy for one or two of your employees to spend several hours each day “tinkering”. Or, you end up paying thousands for their support anyway. Off-the-shelf products are good to a certain extent, but most SMBs outgrow those solutions rather quickly, so those IT dollars usually end up being wasted after all. Either that or your IT department has no real internal tools plan and you will end up with a dozen different tools in half that many years. And then there are point-solutions. Well, that’s just what they are, a point solution, and that won’t last long. You eventually need another one, and then you have tool glut.

The resulting choices are … ?

But wait! There are alternatives! Several smaller vendors are delivering new cutting-edge technologies that far surpass the status quo. These companies are quick on their feet as well, often capable of quickly building you new functionality within their IT management framework specifically for your corporate situation. And now the plug - ByteSphere is one of these smaller alternative vendors, and capable of delivering a fully working network, fault, performance and application management and network monitoring solution. I believe that smaller vendors, like ByteSphere, if they can provide 90% of what the large frameworks do for 10% of the cost, are well worth the investment.

What do you think?

General Discussion fault management, IT, legacy, management framework, monitoring, network management, open-source, SNMP