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Monitoring backups via SNMP or Webhook

antonio
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Hello everyone, how are you guys doing?

Well, currently we have a client that is using Commvault software and he is kinda lost in the alerts that he receives via e-mail (even having the configurations of the Tokens in the Alert when he receives, the pieces of information is not properly shown as he expects like the correct name of the VMs, why some of them are getting errors and which VMs, etc).

With this, he requests to see if there’s an option to receive the Alerts integrating with Zabbix or with something similar. I took a look in the Alerts Configurations and I see the option to use SNMP and Webhooks. Here we already have a Zabbix server that we use to receive some specific Alerts such as if the server is down, or rebooted. With this, I took a look in the documentation and noticed that Commvault can use SNMPv3: https://documentation.commvault.com/v11/essential/97609_setting_up_snmpv3_alert_notifications.html but I didn’t found anything in how to properly configure this so we can use our Zabbix server or anything similar in the Commvault software.

Does anyone know how I could perform this so we can use it not in this case, but also in any client that we need?

PS.: I could configure Telegram with Commvault, but is only text and I was wondering with some more visual and easy to understand.

 

Thanks, 😊

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Best answer by Chuck Graves 24 May 2022, 16:21

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5 replies

christopherlecky
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I haven’t looked at this in a few years but parsing the alerts from snmp are what's the word I'm looking for ….. horrendous.

The reason why is that the format does not have enough fields to be comprehensive. you would first have to enable the traps then parse them.

This is particularly a pain in the behind for Zabbix.

It would be significantly less work for you to spend some time fine tuning the email alerts.

in all honesty you can make the alerts incredibly detailed and specific.

My suggestion is to download the mib and crack it open yourself, and then you can make your own decisions. 

 

That said if you just want to do cool nerdy stuff, there is another thread in this forum where some guy is using teams web hooks, I took a look at it and even though I hate teams its actually a super cool option.


just to be clear you absolutely should be using smnp for application level monitoring.

 Its just not a good use case for job alerts.

snmp should be used for monitoring of hardware and service status. For jobs, webhooks, and emails are much better options.

 

 

 

 

I blame auto-correct for all misspellings, grammatical errors, and half-baked opinions.
christopherlecky
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Derp

I blame auto-correct for all misspellings, grammatical errors, and half-baked opinions.
antonio
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Userlevel 3
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I haven’t looked at this in a few years but parsing the alerts from snmp are what's the word I'm looking for ….. horrendous.

The reason why is that the format does not have enough fields to be comprehensive. you would first have to enable the traps then parse them.

This is particularly a pain in the behind for Zabbix.

It would be significantly less work for you to spend some time fine tuning the email alerts.

in all honesty you can make the alerts incredibly detailed and specific.

My suggestion is to download the mib and crack it open yourself, and then you can make your own decisions. 

 

That said if you just want to do cool nerdy stuff, there is another thread in this forum where some guy is using teams web hooks, I took a look at it and even though I hate teams its actually a super cool option.


just to be clear you absolutely should be using smnp for application level monitoring.

 Its just not a good use case for job alerts.

snmp should be used for monitoring of hardware and service status. For jobs, webhooks, and emails are much better options.

 

 

 

 

Hello @christopherlecky,

As we are an MSP using MS Teams wouldn't be a good way to perform this assuming that every client we have would need to have an MS account to get the info, and most of our clients don’t have and don’t want it. With Zabbix triggers and options in it and with the SNMP option in the Commvault software, I saw a way to perform a most accessible way to those clients that don’t want to open the Commvault Dashboard to see how the things are going and also don’t want to have the mailbox full of info about the backups.

I thought that the use of webhooks would be a good way to not use Zabbix, but since I don't know how to configure and perform correctly webhooks at all (because I never use a webhook in my life, hahaha), I left it as a second option.

In some conversations with some colleagues that use Commvault here in my country, I found a way to perform this by monitoring the Commvault database using a driver in the Zabbix to this with specific triggers to clients who would like this way.

C
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Hello @antonio 

 

There’s actually a few steps here:

 

  • Install SNMPv3 package on the Commserve (link you provided)

https://documentation.commvault.com/v11/essential/97609_setting_up_snmpv3_alert_notifications.html

  • Install SNMP trap receiver software on the computers that will receive the SNMP traps

https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/5382_adding_client_computers_to_receive_snmp_trap_alerts.html

  • Configure alerts to enable SNMP 

https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/5378_setting_up_snmp_trap_alert_notifications.html

  • If Zabbix requires the Engine ID for the Commserve Host, you would need to follow the docs here to add the respective Additional Setting:

https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/92770_obtaining_engine_id_for_commserve_host.html

  • Test and validate through logs (EVMgrS.log at debug level 5) 

 

From the Commvault Side, you should be able to test the alert in the Commcell Console and monitor sentAlerts.log to see the alerts being generate. 

 

As for Webhooks, we do not have much information internally except for the doc below:

 

https://documentation.commvault.com/11.26/essential/144668_adding_webhook.html

 

The documentation basically states to type in the URL provided by the third party software and select “Webhooks” when creating alerts in Admin Console. I’ve experienced a case with Webhooks in which the third party software developer needed to provide an email instead, as he wasn’t sure how the URL was generated on his side. They instead used the email to move the alerts to the proper channels in their software.

 

If you have any issues configuring SNMP alerts or WebHooks, you can always create a case for us to further look into it as well.

 

Hope this helps!

antonio
Rank
Userlevel 3
Badge +7

Hello @antonio 

 

There’s actually a few steps here:

 

  • Install SNMPv3 package on the Commserve (link you provided)

https://documentation.commvault.com/v11/essential/97609_setting_up_snmpv3_alert_notifications.html

  • Install SNMP trap receiver software on the computers that will receive the SNMP traps

https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/5382_adding_client_computers_to_receive_snmp_trap_alerts.html

  • Configure alerts to enable SNMP 

https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/5378_setting_up_snmp_trap_alert_notifications.html

  • If Zabbix requires the Engine ID for the Commserve Host, you would need to follow the docs here to add the respective Additional Setting:

https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/92770_obtaining_engine_id_for_commserve_host.html

  • Test and validate through logs (EVMgrS.log at debug level 5) 

 

From the Commvault Side, you should be able to test the alert in the Commcell Console and monitor sentAlerts.log to see the alerts being generate. 

 

As for Webhooks, we do not have much information internally except for the doc below:

 

https://documentation.commvault.com/11.26/essential/144668_adding_webhook.html

 

The documentation basically states to type in the URL provided by the third party software and select “Webhooks” when creating alerts in Admin Console. I’ve experienced a case with Webhooks in which the third party software developer needed to provide an email instead, as he wasn’t sure how the URL was generated on his side. They instead used the email to move the alerts to the proper channels in their software.

 

If you have any issues configuring SNMP alerts or WebHooks, you can always create a case for us to further look into it as well.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Hello @Chuck Graves,

 

I will follow the steps and see how it works in my environment.

 

As this will take some time to me, I will close this thread with your answer, 😀

 

Thank you, 😊.

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