Monitoring External Devices Using SNMP

It is often critical for an administrator to receive alerts from applications that are not managed by Enterprise Manager. Many of these applications can be configured to trigger SNMP traps when an alert condition takes place. You can receive these traps within Enterprise Manager and start monitoring those applications from Enterprise Manager. Having the capability to receive and analyze SNMP traps raised by such applications allows you extend Enterprise Manager's monitoring and alerting capabilities to these applications and reduce monitoring complexity in your IT environments.

You can configure Enterprise Manager to receive the SNMP traps raised by an application (not managed by Enterprise Manager) and display the traps as alerts in Enterprise Manager.

To receive these traps, you must develop a metadata plug-in to represent the managed entity. Then use an SNMP receivelet or SNMP fetchlet to receive or get monitoring data about that entity.

For more information about developing metadata plug-ins, see the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Extensibility Programmer's Reference.

About SNMP Receivelets

While monitoring third-party entities in your managed environment, if the status of a third-party network element turns unavailable or if its metric severity conditions (metric thresholds) are met or exceeded, the SNMP Agent of that third-party network element sends a notification to the Management Agent. These notifications are in the form of SNMP traps that get triggered asynchronously upon reaching the performance thresholds, and without any requests from the Management Agent.

Since these traps are based on SNMP, the Management Agent uses SNMP Receivelets to receive and translate these SNMP traps into a form compatible with Oracle Management Service.

For more information about the SNMP receivelet, see the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Extensibility Programmer's Reference.

About SNMP Fetchlets

Fetchlets are parameterized data access mechanisms available to map relevant data from a managed element into Enterprise Manager's metric format. In the standards area, Enterprise Manager currently uses SNMP Fetchlets to fetch information from SNMP-enabled entities within your managed environment.

The SNMP fetchlet queries the SNMP Agent for data about the managed entity as defined in the target type's Management Information Base (MIB). For more information about the MIB, see About the Management Information Base (MIB) and Management Information Base (MIB).

For more information about the SNMP fetchlet, see the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Extensibility Programmer's Reference.