Send Messages to an SNMP Management System

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) defines a set of protocols that describe management data and the protocols for exchanging that data between systems.

Connect:Direct® for Microsoft Windows provides an extension agent that works with Microsoft Windows SNMP Extensible Agent to send traps to a configured Network Manager. See Microsoft documentation for details on configuring the SNMP service to send traps.

Connect:Direct for Microsoft Windows enables messages to be written to the event log. Traps are triggered by Connect:Direct for Microsoft Windows messages. Certain messages are associated with trap events. However, you can also define any message to be a trap event. When Connect:Direct for Microsoft Windows starts, it processes the configuration file to create a table of trap-event messages. When a trap-event message occurs, it is forwarded to the extension agent. The extension agent works with the Microsoft Windows SNMP Extensible Agent to forward the trap to all configured network managers. The network managers who receive the messages are defined when you install Microsoft SNMP.

To activate SNMP trapping, set the SNMP initialization parameter to Y. The default is N.

When a trap-event message occurs, Connect:Direct for Microsoft Windows writes the message to the application event log.

To activate event logging, set the initialization parameter called EVENTLOG to Y. The default is N.

The configuration file is used by both SNMP and event logging. It is specified by the SNMP.DSN initialization parameter and the default file name is:

installation directory/snmp/snmp.ini

where installation directory is the location where you installed Connect:Direct for Microsoft Windows.

The configuration file enables you to customize the events that can be trapped. By default, all events are enabled. If you want to disable some events or define other messages to be trap events, edit this file with any standard editing tool.

Do one or more of the following to customize the configuration file:
  • To turn off an event, set its value to N.
  • To turn off all status traps, set sendStatusTraps=No.
  • To turn off all alarm traps, set sendAlarmTraps=No.
  • To define a list of Connect:Direct messages that will produce an alarm trap, use the following: USERMESSAGEALARM = (message ID, message-list)
  • To define a list of Connect:Direct messages that will produce a status trap, use the following: USERMESSAGESTATUS = (message ID, message-list)

When the server is started, the SNMP and EVENTLOG initialization parameters are checked. If the SNMP and EVENTLOG parameters are not specified, SNMP and event logging are not activated.