Smarts IP : Can a specific IP address be specified as the AgentAddress?

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:


How to specify a specific IP address as the AgentAddress for a device

A device may have many IP addresses, and an IP address which cannot respond to SNMP requests is selected as the AgentAddress, therefore SNMP communications are failing.

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - SMARTS

Resolution

There is no way to specify a certain IP address to be the AgentAddress. The selection of IP depends on the device. If the device has multiple management addresses, then the address which replies first will be selected as the SNMP Agent address.

One workaround which may be to configure your SNMP Management IP as your loopback address and setting AccessAddressFormat = "LOOPBACKADDRESS" in your IP discovery.conf file (<BASEDIR>/IP/smarts/conf/discovery.conf)

AccessAddressFormat - determines how the discovery process obtains an IP address to communicate with discovered systems. This address is used for ICMP and SNMP polls during discovery and for monitoring and analysis.

LOOPBACKADDRES - means that the discovery process uses the loopback address for both ICMP and SNMP for monitoring and discovery.

Specifying the above in the discovery.conf file makes this setting global. However, you may wish to set this on a per device basis which can be achieved using the parameter below in your seedfile for each device entry.

ADDRESSFORMAT=LOOPBACKADDRESS

Please refer to the IP configuration guide for full details.