Sensor of the Week: SNMP Trap Receiver Sensor

Originally published on November 13, 2014 by Florian Staffort
Last updated on March 03, 2022 • 8 minute read

Did you know with PRTG Network Monitor you have a full scale SNMP Trap Receiver at hand? With SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) traps you can easily track reports of important incidents and data. SNMP-enabled devices trigger these asynchronous notifications for various reasons, such as system events, outages, critical conditions, and many more. PRTG collects these messages, stores them in a high performance database, and analyzes their content.

 

Under lab conditions, PRTG could handle up to 10,000 SNMP trap messages per second when using a single sensor without filters. Wow, that's quite a lot! Imagine you had to analyze them all manually. But please note that the number of messages the trap receiver can process depends on your configuration and system setup.

With PRTG you can filter these incoming messages by various parameters and trigger alerts depending on the content of the message, which could be emails, texts, or external programs being executed. This way you always stay on top of important information regarding your SNMP-enabled devices—and let PRTG do the big share of the work.

You can either add the SNMP Trap Receiver sensor to:

  • Your probe device, processing all messages from any device sent to the probe system, or
  • Directly to a specific device, to have an implicit filter for this device already and a faster performance than using source filters on a probe device.

 

The SNMP Trap Receiver sensor shows the overall number of received traps per second, warning and error traps per second, as well as the number of dropped packets per second. To get the most out of it, refine filters and create notification triggers—this way you can customize PRTG to only send the alerts you really need to see. You can also filter your received messages to easily get an overview of specific incidents.

For detailed instructions on how you can setup a sample configuration of the SNMP Trap Receiver sensor, please have a look at the PRTG manual page on "Monitoring Syslogs and SNMP Traps". In the manual you'll also find information on the sensor and its individual settings itself.

You'll also get a useful overview of the SNMP Trap Receiver sensor in our 10 minute video tutorial: 

 

All Sensors Of The Week

You have missed other articles of our "Sensors of the Week" blog series? Just take a look at the last 10 sensors:

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