Using PRTG as an SNMP Trap Server

SNMP Traps are log messages sent network devices to a SNMP Trap server, where those messages are received and processed. Using the SNMP Trap Receiver sensor you can configure any PRTG probe device as an SNMP trap server.

How Does PRTG Analyze SNMP Traps?

The sensor checks periodically if new SNMP traps have been received. You can configure PRTG to send a notification whenever an SNMP Trap is received (this should only be used if you only receive a few traps). It is generally more effective to have the SNMP Trap server check if a certain text is or is not included in the SNMP Trap, and trigger an alarm accordingly.

The SNMP Trap Server functionality is a great tool if you need to monitor a small number of network devices that send traps from time to time. It saves you the cost and work of installing, setting up and managing a dedicated trap receiver software for just a few devices.

A Complete Network Monitoring Solution: PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG Network Monitor is Paessler's powerful network monitoring solution. The software includes more than 115 sensor types for all common network services (e.g. PING, HTTP, POP, IIS, FTP, etc.), which monitor your network systems for speed and failures. If an outage occurs the software alerts you by sending emails, SMS, pager messages and other notifications. Request times and downtimes are constantly recorded in the database, enabling you to generate performance, downtime and SLA reports at any given time.

All PRTG licenses also support many advanced sensor types such as the built-in QoS sensor or the free IP SLA monitor functionality for VoIP network monitoring, or special hyper-V and VMware sensors for virtualization monitoring. A web performance test can also be run, checking not only website response time and availability, but also controlling if databases are running and online transactions can be made. In a similar fashion to the SNMP Trap server capability, PRTG also can be used as a syslog server for Windows: the software receives syslog messages sent by managed devices and sends notifications depending on the content of these messages.