Netcool/OMNIbus MIB Manager

Almost all of the Netcool/OMNIbus implementations I’ve observed make use of the SNMP probe in some fashion and quite rightly so as it’s a very useful tool for integrating alert emitting products and devices into the event management system.  One of the downsides of using SNMP is that it can be quite a painful and arduous task to deconstruct the incoming traps and write probe rules to apply the required event formatting and processing logic.  

Fortunately the newly released MIB Manager utility, which supersedes the MIB2Rules tool, makes the task somewhat simpler.  In a nutshell, given a MIB file from the software or device vendor in question, MIB Manager can convert the contents into working SNMP probe rules.  The resulting rules are likely to require some manual fine tuning but a significant amount of the heavy lifting is taken care of.  The first thing that you may notice is that unlike the previous incarnation, MIB Manager uses an Eclipse based interface,  meaning that there is no longer a dependency on a suitably configured Perl installation to get it up and running.

mibman app

The first step is to import the vendor MIBs by selecting the folder in which the MIB file(s) reside.

mibman import

Following the import, you should now be able to browse the OID Tree and see the newly added elements.

mibman oidtree

With the MIBs imported, we can now export them in format that is going to be more useful.  In the example below I’ve opted for “Netcool Knowledge Library version 2.x/3.x” but there are plenty of other options including lookup table, lookup file and standalone rules file formats.

mibman export

The export results in a number of lookup and rules files being created for each of the selected MIBs.

mibman files

At this point you will need to review the rules files generated to determine if the values set for fields such as Summary and Severity etc are appropriate.  Global changes to the Severity settings can be made in the *.sev.snmptrap.lookup file, whilst any trap specific customisation can be done in the *.user.include.snmptrap.rules file. With the rules files finalised, they then need to be incorporated into the probe configuration.  This is done by copying the generate rules and lookup files to the probe and placing them in a vendor directory under $NC_RULES_HOME/include-snmptrap. References to the “master” files are then added to the appropriate sections of the snmptrap.rules file e.g.

include “$NC_RULES_HOME/include-snmptrap/vmware/vmware.m2r.master.include.lookup”

include “$NC_RULES_HOME/include-snmptrap/vmware/vmware.m2r.master.include.rules”

include “$NC_RULES_HOME/include-snmptrap/vmware/vmware-preclass.include.snmptrap.rules”

With the rules in place, you can use MIB Manager to generate test traps to ensure they are processed as expected.

mibman trap

MIB Manager is available to download from   https://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/gat/toolsutils.

Visits: 647