Enabling SNMP on VMware UAGs

I recently had a client ask me about the SNMP capabilities of the VMware Unified Access Gateway (UAG) appliances. Specifically how you could enable SNMP traps on the UAGs. There is an easily found button to enable the SNMP but no real way to configure a community string for the traps.

The short answer to this query is you can’t enable traps on the UAG appliances. More accurately, the Unified Access Gateway appliance does not support traps with its current SNMP implementation.

When you enable the SNMP service on the UAG server, you are basically enabling SNMPGET and GETNEXT support on UDP port 161 for the appliances. This allows capable managers to query the devices and pull basic monitoring information from them such as sysName, sysDescr(iption), sysUptimeInstance, and CPU and memory information.

The big difference between this feature and a traditional SNMP TRAP is the trap is SENT from the UAG while this requires the SNMP manager to pull the information from the appliance. The other practical difference is that the information provided by the MIB is pretty basic in nature.

• UCD-SNMP-MIB::systemStats
• UCD-SNMP-MIB::memory
• VMWARE-TUNNEL-SERVER-MIB::vmwTunnelServerMIB

If you want a more efficient push-style alerting mechanism, you are better off using the SYSLOG event monitoring.

Happy Monitoring!
–Carlo