3PAR SNMP

SNMP Primer

Before we dive into configuring SNMP for 3PAR lets do a quick review of what SNMP is, SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. SNMP is used for configuring and collecting information from network devices including storage. The focus of this post is using SNMP as a monitoring tool for alerts.

An SNMP infrastructure is based around two components, the manager which acts as the collection point for all alerts and agents which are software on the end points that report back to the manager.

What information can be monitored is defined by a MIB (Management Information Base). The MIB’s are a collection of managed objects identified by Object Identifiers (OID). These OID list the characteristics of the devices that can be managed.

3PAR and SNMP

3PAR has its own SNMP agent built into the device. The 3PAR MIB is contained within the 3PAR CLI download. The HP 3PAR SNMP agent supports SNMPv3, SNMPv2c, SMI-v2 standards.

You will notice SMI-v2 listed as a compatible standard with 3PAR, SMI stands for Storage Management Initiative. SMI was launched by SNIA to provide a common framework all storage vendors could adhere to, allowing common management tools across all vendors.

Configuring SNMP for 3PAR

You will configure SNMP for 3PAR using the CLI, it’s dead easy and I will provide all the steps you will need below.

1 Once you are connected to the 3PAR CLI you will add the SNMP Manager.  Remember the manager is the device that is the trap destination i.e. the SNMP server

addsnmpmgr <manager ip address>

The above command should be sufficient for most situations, but if your manager server requires a password or other config different from the default you can use the following options:

  • -p <port_number> – Specifies the port number where the manager receives traps. The default port 162
  • -pw <password> – Specifies the manager’s access password, if the manager has one
  • -r <number> – Specifies the number of times the system will attempt to resend the trap if the manager is not available. The default is 2
  • -t <seconds> – Specifies the number of seconds to wait between retries. The default is 200

2 When using the addsnmpmgr  command the community name will be set to public, if you need to set a custom community name or change the access permissions use the following command:

setsnmppw –r <community name>

(-r = read-only, -w = write-only and -rw = read-write)

3 You can view your 3PAR SNMP configuration with the following command 

showsnmpmgr

4 Finally you can send a test trap to make sure everything is working OK

checksnmp

Enabling SMI

If your monitoring solution requires SMI you will need to enable it on the 3PAR.

Open the 3PAR Command Line Interface (CLI) and connect to the 3PAR system:

1 Enable the SMI-S provider startcim

2 Check status of SMI-S Provider showcim

3 Restarting the SMI-S Provider stopcim –f –x

To stay in touch with more 3PAR news and tips connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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17 thoughts on “3PAR SNMP

  1. Hi,
    we are getting snmp traps from new model of 3PAR devices. .1.3.6.1.4.1.12925.1.8.1479441072 . however we dont have MIB file supported for these traps. is this snmp configuration issue on 3PAR device?

    1. update to 3.2.1 MU3 or later to address the “extra” characters appended to outgoing traps. There is only the OID .1.3.6.1.4.1.12925.1.8. anything else on the end is a bug with the older 3.2.1 MU1 version.

      1. Wiley, I have a customer running 3.2.1 MU2 and is experiencing an issue as well. Would that fall under the fix in update 3.2.1 MU3?

  2. We tried to set this up with PRTG Network Monitor as well and failed. We used following commands on the 3Par box:

    addsnmpmgr 172.17.50.20
    setsnmppw -r public

    CIM and SNMP manager are both enabled:

    STRZ1001 cli% showcim
    -Service- -State- –SLP– SLPPort -HTTP– HTTPPort -HTTPS- HTTPSPort PGVer CIMVer
    Enabled Active Enabled 427 Enabled 5988 Enabled 5989 2.9.1 3.2.2

    STRZ1001 cli% showsnmpmgr
    HostIP Port SNMPVersion User
    172.17.50.20 162 2 —

    I imported the MIB via the Paessler MIB Importer V3.4.8 alpha. When i try to add a sensor, PRTG tells me: Keine verfügbaren Schnittstellen auf diesem Gerät (Code: PE049)

    Which basically means: no interfaces on this device (Code: PE049)
    Any idea how to solve this?

  3. Very noobish question here… I want to set this up to monitor via snmp on PRTG. Will this process require any downtime at all? I need to make sure my datastores don’t go down.

      1. Thanks… I tried using all of your steps but I still cannot connect to snmp. Port 162 is not even detected as being open when I do a port scan. Do I need to make a firewall change or something?

    1. Hey Joe

      You can in fact get lots of SNMP values with a SNMP walk on the system. There are around 140 different values as i remember correctly. But there is no documentation of what they mean. I think this is from back when 3par was on its own. After they have been bought, HP has no interest in supporting something free like SNMP. They want you to buy their expensive OpenView solution. So i tried to find out what those values mean. From my experience, you can only get standard linux SNMP information out of the 3par box. Things like uptime, CPU load, Ram usage, NIC utilization and so on… We were interested in the capacity of virtual volumes and other storage related values. We had to bury that dream.

      Regards,
      John

  4. I agree with John. It seems so, recently our company newly bought this 3PAR 8200 storage. and I’m looking for getting any precious value to monitor, such as Operation Error status or Virtual Volume status.

    1. I don’t think you will be able to see the password or this would be a security issue. I would suggest removing the config and adding it again with a password you can make a note of.

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