OpenNMS and Windows Monitoring

Now that OpenNMS has discovered my network, how can I get even more out of it?

My first thought was to extend OpenNMS to accommodate what I'm looking for. That's a lot like work, so I've installed and enabled SNMP on one of my Windows 2003 servers.

A little searching turned up this set of instructions for configuring SNMP (because MS' instructions are atrocious. A "configuring snmp" section should do more than tell you what configuring it would get you, if they were planning on being so gracious as to tell you how to do it).

It's under the properties for the service. That's a great place for it - no sarcasm intended. Of course, there's only a couple of other services that do that, so I don't look there.

Anyway...

I configured the community name, and set the destination to the FQDN of the OpenNMS server. Restarted the service, and ta-da! OpenNMS started receiving messages. And complaining about them.

Checked the Security tab, and added the OpenNMS server to the list of "Accept SNMP packets from these hosts" list.

There's a section in the OpenNMS admin section for configuring what IP addresses will be sending traps, and what community name they send. I left it at v1.

It started working after that.

I'm not entirely thrilled with this as a solution. It is known to be pretty insecure. Let's see what kind of data comes through...and I'm just not getting the point. There doesn't seem to be anything new. Maybe SNMP is just too smart for me. Ah well.

Update: I did a little configuration with evntwin.exe, and started forwarding various W3SVC events to OpenNMS. That was all around kludgey, and not really worth the effort.

I still like OpenNMS as a lightweight inventory and monitoring system, though.