Overview

SNMP Traps are notifications sent from an SNMP-enabled device to an SNMP manager. When a network device encounters unusual activity, such as a sudden state change on a piece of equipment, the device triggers an SNMP Trap event.

Monitoring SNMP Traps helps you to capture issues that might otherwise go unnoticed due to device instability. For example, if an interface is flapping between an available and a broken state every 15 seconds, relying on polls that run every 60 seconds could lead you to misjudge the degree of network instability. Traps can also fill visibility gaps for certain hardware components, such as device battery or chassis health.

Datadog Agent v7.37+ supports listening for SNMP Traps, enabling you to set up monitors for specific Trap events.

Configuration

To enable listening for SNMP Traps, add the following to datadog.yaml:

network_devices:
  namespace: <NAMESPACE> # optional, defaults to "default".
  snmp_traps:
    enabled: true
    port: 9162 # on which ports to listen for traps
    community_strings: # which community strings to allow for v2 traps
      - <STRING_1>
      - <STRING_2>
    bind_host: 0.0.0.0
    users: # SNMP v3
    - user: "user"
      authKey: myAuthKey
      authProtocol: "SHA"
      privKey: myPrivKey
      privProtocol: "AES" # choices: MD5, SHA, SHA224, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512
    - user: "user"
      authKey: myAuthKey
      authProtocol: "MD5"
      privKey: myPrivKey
      privProtocol: "DES"
    - user: "user2"
      authKey: myAuthKey2
      authProtocol: "SHA"
      privKey: myPrivKey2
      privProtocol: "AES" # choices: DES, AES (128 bits), AES192, AES192C, AES256, AES256C

Device namespaces

As in Network Device Monitoring, namespaces can be used as tags to differentiate between multiple network devices that may share the same private IP. For example, consider a case of two routers: one in New York and one in Paris, which share the same private IP. There should be one Agent in the New York data center and another in the Paris data center. You may wish to tag these with namespace: nyc and namespace: paris, respectively.

The namespace can then be used to uniquely pivot from an SNMP Trap to the emitter device, or from the emitter device to an SNMP Trap.

It is critical to have consistency between the multiple Agent configurations. For instance, if you have two Agents configured (for example, one for trap collection, and the other for metrics) you must ensure that the namespaces exist in both places. Alternatively, ensure that the namespaces exist in neither.

Resolution

Each SNMP Trap has a specific OID-based format. The Datadog Agent performs a resolution step to convert OIDs into more readable strings.

An SNMP Trap consists of:

• Emitter information (for example, the IP of the device)
• An OID that defines the type of trap
• “Variables”—that is, a list of pairs (OID:value) that provides additional context for the trap.

Decoding is performed on the Agent side, using a mapping stored on disk at $<PATH_TO_AGENT_CONF.D>/snmp.d/traps_db/dd_traps_db.json.gz. Datadog supports more than 11,000 different management information bases (MIBs).

Mapping format

Mappings are stored as TrapsDB files, and can be YAML or JSON.

Examples

mibs:
- NET-SNMP-EXAMPLES-MIB
traps:
  1.3.6.1.4.1.8072.2.3.0.1:
    mib: NET-SNMP-EXAMPLES-MIB
    name: netSnmpExampleHeartbeatNotification
vars:
  1.3.6.1.4.1.8072.2.3.2.1:
    name: netSnmpExampleHeartbeatRate

{
  "mibs": [
    "NET-SNMP-EXAMPLES-MIB"
  ],
  "traps": {
    "1.3.6.1.4.1.8072.2.3.0.1": {
      "mib": "NET-SNMP-EXAMPLES-MIB",
      "name": "netSnmpExampleHeartbeatNotification"
    }
  },
  "vars": {
    "1.3.6.1.4.1.8072.2.3.2.1": {
      "name": "netSnmpExampleHeartbeatRate"
    }
  }
}

Extend the Agent

To extend the capabilities of the Agent, create your own mappings and place them in the $<PATH_TO_AGENT_CONF.D>/snmp.d/traps_db/ directory.

You can write these mappings by hand, or generate mappings from a list of MIBs using Datadog’s developer toolkit, ddev.

Generate a TrapsDB file from a list of MIBs

Prerequisites:

• Python 3
• ddev (pip3 install "datadog-checks-dev[cli]")
• pysmi (pip3 install pysmi)

Put all your MIBs into a dedicated folder. Then, run: ddev meta snmp generate-traps-db -o ./output_dir/ /path/to/my/mib1 /path/to/my/mib2 /path/to/my/mib3 ...

If your MIBs have dependencies, ddev fetches them online if they can be found.

If there are errors due to missing dependencies and you have access to the missing MIB files, put the files in a separate folder and use the --mib-sources <DIR> parameter so that ddev knows where to find them. Make sure that each filename is the same as the MIB name (for example, SNMPv2-SMI and not snmp_v2_smi.txt).