Traps And Smart Traps; Device Status Polling - Extreme Networks EPICenter Guide Manual

EPICenter Overview
The Remote Monitoring (RMON) MIB
EPICenter can use statistics gathered from the Remote Monitoring (RMON) MIB to provide utilization
statistics on a port-by-port basis, if RMON is supported and enabled on the Extreme Networks devices
EPICenter is managing. Utilization and error statistics can be displayed within the Real-Time Statistics
applet, which provides a number of chart, graph, and tabular display formats. RMON utilization
statistics can also be displayed as end-point annotations on the links between devices on a Topology
map. The EPICenter Alarm Manager also provides the ability to define threshold-based RMON rules for
generating trap events that can be used in EPICenter alarm definitions.

Traps and Smart Traps

Fault detection is based on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps, syslog messages, and
some limited polling. The Alarm System supports SNMP Management Information Base-2 (MIB-2), the
Extreme Networks private MIB, Remote Monitoring (RMON) traps, and selected traps from other MIBs.
The EPICenter software uses a mechanism called SmartTraps to identify changes in Extreme Networks
device configuration.
When an Extreme Networks switch is added to the EPICenter database, the EPICenter software creates
a set of SmartTraps rules that define the configuration change events that the EPICenter server needs to
know about. These rules are downloaded into the Extreme Networks switch, and the EPICenter server
is automatically registered as a trap receiver on the switch. Subsequently, whenever a status or
configuration change takes place, the ExtremeWare software in the switch uses the SmartTraps rules to
determine if the EPICenter server should be notified. These changes can be changes in device status,
such as fan failure or overheating, or configuration changes made on the switch through the
ExtremeWare CLI or ExtremeWare Vista.
For non-Extreme devices, EPICenter does not automatically register itself as a trap receiver; you must
manually configure those devices to send traps to EPICenter. See Appendix B in the EPICenter Reference
Guide for information on configuring devices to send traps to EPICenter.

Device Status Polling

EPICenter uses several types of polling to monitor the status of the devices it manages. Since device
polling adds a certain amount of traffic load to the network, EPICenter tries to minimize the amount of
polling that it does, and many aspects of its polling algorithms are configurable.
EPICenter polls for basic device status approximately every five minutes using SNMP. This poll interval
can be changed in the Administration applet under the Server Properties for SNMP. EPICenter also
polls periodically for detailed device status information. By default, this interval is 30 minutes for
Extreme Networks modular chassis switches, and 90 minutes for Extreme Networks stackable chassis
switches. The detailed polling interval can be set for individual devices through the Inventory Manager
feature. The detailed polling gets more complete information, still only polls for information that has
changed; a manual sync is required to retrieve all information about the device. A sync is performed
automatically whenever the EPICenter client is started.
Telnet Polling
When it is not possible to use SNMP to obtain information from Extreme Networks devices, EPICenter
will use Telnet polling instead. EPICenter uses Telnet polling to obtain MAC address information for
edge ports from a device Forwarding Database (FDB) and to obtain netlogin information. For some old
versions of ExtremeWare, ESRP information must be obtained via Telnet rather than SNMP. Telnet
polling is also used to obtain power supply IDs for Alpine devices.
22 EPICenter Concepts and Solutions Guide