How to send SNMP traps to redundant ActiveGates

[LaurentBignens]

Hi Everyone,

What would the recommended solution be, to handle SNMP traps (=UDP protocol) sent from an SNMP emitter device,
onto a pair of redundant ActiveGate servers.

Option 1:
Send the SNMP traps to both redundant ActiveGate servers.
-> The downside of this solution is that it will result in producing multiple DT problems for a single snmp trap (1 from each AG)

Option 2:
Send the SNMP traps to a floating IP, that would route traffic to one of the redundant ActiveGate servers
-> For this solution, the IP would switch onto the 2nd ActiveGate when the 1st ActiveGate failed.

Option 3:
Send the SNMP traps to a Load Balancer, that would UDP traffic to one of the redundant ActiveGate servers
-> For this solution, our network team said that balancing UDP traffic with a Loadbalancer was an issue because of the reliability of the UDP protocol with no ack of the traffic sent

[AntonioSousa]

@LaurentBignens 

Redundant processing of SNMP traps is always a big challenge. You cannot guarantee that it arrives at the balancer in the first place...

With option #1, you would have to eventually de-duplicate entries. With option #2, you would have to figure out if AG is running or not. But, eventually, some endpoint that you query might be working, but SNMP traps is not working. Option #3 doesn't seem much different than #2, but has the inconvenients stated by your network team.

Good news is it is pretty reliable, so I would go for #3

[gilles_tabary]

Any experience someone around SNMP traps sent over TCP through a frontal load balancer distributing to redundant AG ?

[AntonioSousa · Accepted solution]

@gilles_tabary,

I'm almost pretty sure that Dynatrace doesn't support TCP SNMP traps, as most of vendors also don't.

Another interesting alternative are SNMP INFORMs, also not supported by Dynatrace. I have put in a Product Idea for that: https://community.dynatrace.com/t5/Product-ideas/Support-for-SNMP-INFORMs/idi-p/248475

[gilles_tabary]

Thanks. 🙂