SNMP Traps On Audit Rule Failure

Hi folks!

Just wanted to let you know that we’ve just added the capability to send SNMP traps to the seafelt Configuration Manager auditor.

So What?

What does this mean? Well, let’s say you have a nightly audit process that generates the usual audit reports. Great. They’re probably stored on a webserver somewhere for historical purposes, or so people can go back and find out what broke when. You might also email the report to someone, maybe even a list. Someone might even read them.

When we first install the audit tool at a customer’s site, they’re often amazed at all the things they didn’t even know were broken. There’s a flurry of enthusiasm. Cool.

But after a while, complacency sets in. It’s really easy to ignore an email, particularly when you get hundreds each day. You set up a filter that puts the audit reports into a folder, and you fully intend to read them. One day.

A Sense Of Urgency

Now you can immediately send a trap from the auditor into your enterprise fault management system. The alarms will go off. You know that this is something that you must fix. Particularly if you flag that particular trap type as a Sev 1 or Sev 2 incident.

All your existing fault management processes come to bear on the problem. And the problem will get fixed. Which is the entire point of having the audit there in the first place: To detect and fix brokenness.

Configurable

Of course, you don’t want to create a Sev 1 incident for every audit rule that fails. Yes, the SNMP trapping facility is fully configurable, with sensible defaults. You can send traps on just one rule, a whole group of rules, or all rules, if you like. You can even send the traps to different destinations, if you want. No problem.

Shed some light into the dark corners of your IT operation.

Email us at scm@seafelt.com for more information!