SNMP Traps Aren’t Dead Yet – How to Uncover Their Full Potential

If you’re a network engineer, you know the challenges of troubleshooting an intermittent network issue—sifting through logs and metrics, stumbling across a series of cryptic SNMP traps, and asking:

What does this mean?

Is it related to the issue at hand?

And more importantly, how long will it take to decode this message?

SNMP traps are challenging for network teams for many reasons, including: 

• The encoded nature of SNMP data. Encoding makes it harder for network administrators to quickly understand the meaning of trap messages.

• Lack of support. Legacy trap tools often have limited support for new or less-often used traps, leading teams to disable these trap sources and miss important data.

• Lack of automation. Because decoding is hard, few integrations or machine learning jobs exist to auto-close traps or start workflows based on the content and type of traps.

If you want to get the full value that SNMP traps can provide in the new year, understanding current trends and new use cases that are made possible by clear, actionable messages can help ease your team’s frustrations.

The use of SNMP traps persists 

For over 20 years, we’ve heard predictions that SNMP will soon become obsolete. While this may eventually happen, the reality for network teams is that many devices still depend on SNMP as their primary method for sending autonomous messages and gathering metrics.

For example, legacy network devices like switches, routers, and firewalls still use SNMP to send trap alerts and track performance metrics. In fact, a recent internal survey of our users revealed that SNMP trap functionality remains the top-requested feature among network professionals, underscoring its ongoing relevance. So, while SNMP may disappear someday, for now, network teams need more support in this area (more on the solution to that shortly).

A shift toward open platforms

Many network teams still rely on legacy tools, including some closed systems that limit data access and create visibility gaps. These limitations lead to blind spots between teams and integration challenges with other systems.

Using an open platform for observability data provides greater flexibility and accessibility. This shift presents an opportunity for the industry to embrace open, flexible platforms for network, security, and DevOps teams. These platforms improve integration, enhance data utilization across tools and systems, and support adding SNMP traps as a log-type data source to be aggregated with all other log sources other Ops teams collect. This open data platform can then run anomaly detection on an additional data source, providing a whole new value and use case for well-formatted and machine-readable SNMP traps.

Transformation of Raw Data

Interpreting encoded SNMP trap messages is a challenging and time-consuming task for network teams, primarily due to the lack of context and the encoded nature of the data.

For instance, when a team receives an SNMP trap alert about a potential issue with a router’s performance, the message is often packed with complex codes and data. Without proper interpretation, network teams struggle to quickly identify the affected router, pinpoint the specific interface that’s down, or assess the overall impact, leading to delayed troubleshooting and operational disruptions. While most basic SNMP traps are being decoded by most SNMP trap tools, there are major differences in depth of support and the quality of the resulting message. Especially the aspect of machine-readability is often severely lacking in many tools, forcing network engineers to manually look at every single incoming trap.

This lack of clarity delays response times, increases downtime, and frustrates teams as they decode messages, cross-reference logs, and search for root causes. To address these challenges, we’ve developed an innovative solution based on the feedback of our users. NetObserv SNMP now transforms raw SNMP trap data into actionable insights, allowing network teams to respond faster and more efficiently, while providing the open data platform approach you come to know from ElastiFlow.

Innovating to reduce SNMP trap frustrations 

ElastiFlow has developed a new SNMP trap feature that is part of our NetObserv solution and its existing SNMP capabilities. The new collector bridges the gap between legacy SNMP technology and modern observability needs. Key features include:  

1. Comprehensive device support. Out-of-the-box support for a wide range of network devices, including major vendors like Cisco and Juniper.

2. Advanced data processing. Normalization of traps from different SNMP versions and transformation of raw data into human-readable formats.

3. Flexibility and extensibility. Support for many open data platforms and customizable dashboards.

4. Future-proofing. Planned enhancements include expanded device support, improved correlation between related traps, and integration with network logs.

As networks become more complex, tools like ElastiFlow’s SNMP trap collector will become increasingly important as they bridge the gap between legacy protocols and modern observability needs, empowering network administrations to respond faster to issues and maintain more reliable networks. 

Ready to simplify SNMP trap management? Watch our recent webinar, “SNMP Traps Without the Trap,” to discover how to decode data faster, optimize performance, and streamline your SNMP trap management process.