snmp

[justjohnson]

Anybody out there integrate anything using snmp? I have a customer who wants to monitor his servers, pdu's, etc in his data center through the ems and I am wondering what kinds of information I can expect to give him.

[orion242]

What types of equipment?

I have done a good deal of work integrating data center equipment. Most of the stuff is Modbus that I have come across, although some of it has SNMP or XML interfaces.

Leibert, APC, CAT, all have pretty complete Modbus interfaces. You can expect just about every temp, current, voltage, and setpoint in the device will be available.

[steves4]

Anybody out there integrate anything using snmp? I have a customer who wants to monitor his servers, pdu's, etc in his data center through the ems and I am wondering what kinds of information I can expect to give him.


If your ems is OPC based you could use the SNMP-OPC Server. This products parses SNMP MIBs and discovers all SNMP devices on your network. In operation OPC reads <-> SNMP GET requests, OPC writes <-> SNMP SNMP SET requests, and SNMP traps <-> OPC Alarm and Event transactions. There is a very clean 1 to 1 mapping between the two name spaces. If you need more information check out the presentations on our web site or contact me. Contact info is in my profile.

By the way, the OPC-SNMP Enterprise Agent (eAgent) does the inverse function. i.e. allows you to monitor an OPC-based ems from a SNMP enterprise manager.

This functionality will be available for BACnet systems in the future. It's on our product roadmap but not yet scheduled.

[checkvalve]

Tridium has an snmp driver which uses the MIBs to find all of the available data points and alarm traps. Plus you can generate alarm traps from other things in the station or other field buses such as lon, bacnet, modbus, opc or whatever.

[justjohnson]

the customer currently has an AX system installed. I was planning on licensing a Jace for SNMP. We are already tied into the Lieberts via MS/TP to the Sitelink. The customer is hoping to get more information about his servers, routers and power units (they do not have modbus). I have just not used snmp before and therefore do not know what kind of information to expect. Power usage, alarm info (what conditions alarm), CPU temperatures, etc. Thanks

[checkvalve]

Get the MIB files for the devices that you are planning on integrating with. The MIB files can be opened in a text editor and you can see what data is exposed. Or you can setup the SNMP driver in the station and walk the MIB to see the available data points. This allows you to map points offline.

[orion242]

iReasoning MIB browser will go out and discover what is there, and it's freeware. You will likely find that just about anything your heart desires is available from the device via SNMP.

What amazes me is there is a ton of software for SNMP devices, yet there is still demand to pull this information into a BMS. There is plenty of alarming, graphing and data logging software out there for SNMP.