Creating an SNMP Trap and sending Events to a ServiceNow Instance

Hello Everyone I am a technical trainer working for ServiceNow and I have over the years delivered many courses in the ITOM field. I teach and have taught subjects such as Discovery, Service Mapping, Event Management and Cloud Management.

In this article I will describe by example the process of setting up SNMP Traps and generating Events from those Traps in a ServiceNow instance. This blog is based upon my understanding and my practical application examples.

SNMP Traps

SNMP Traps are events that we wish to capture on any SNMP enabled device. Some event examples are; a service state (e.g. up/down) on a host, a hardware failure on a server, invalid login attempt on a network device or even a printer being out of paper. The trap requires the device to send a Trap to a SNMP Trap Manager which will be a service/application running on a Host system.

MIBs

MIB is short for Management Information Base. MIBs are files provided by a manufacturer (e.g. Microsoft) to define the attributes of a managed device and the state values for those attributes. MIBs are required to translate the SNMP data coming from the Trap.

Example scenario

In my example I will use a Windows Host to trigger Traps that will be sent to a ServiceNow MID Server and passed on as Events to a ServiceNow Instance. In the example I describe, that the MID Server is running on the same Windows host as the source of the event Traps. However, in reality the Trap Manager and the Trap source will be two different networked devices. In this case the Trap that will be generated will be a Windows Event - Event ID 7036 - regarding the state of the services running on the Windows Server (e.g. Up/Down).

Please see attached document explaining how to set up the ServiceNow instance, MID Server and Windows Host to listen for and receive Traps.

Please let me know your thoughts and comments on this functionality and my article.

Also note that my example is for demonstration purposes and should be carried out in a 'sand-box' environment.

Regards, Darren Halliday