Configure SNMP Agent in Windows 2000/XP/2003

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to Windows Reference RSS feed Thanks for visiting!

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is used to manage networked devices, monitor and alert of any events on the systems that can be critical.

Click here to see how to install SNMP Service in Windows. Once installed we can configure the SNMP on the server/system as an SNMP agent. This SNMP agent can be polled by an SNMP server or can send SNMP trap messages to send SNMP alert messages when there is an event.

To configure SNMP agent in Windows,

1. Click Start – Run – Type “Services.msc” and press enter. This opens the Services Management Console.

2. In the right-pane, right-click on SNMP Service and select “Properties”

3. Click the “Agent” tab, enter the name of the “Contact”, “Location” and select the services for which an event can trigger a trap or can be queried by an SNMP management server.

4. Click the “Traps” tab and enter the Community name and Trap destinations. This allows the SNMP agent to send SNMP trap messages to SNMP Management servers when an event occurs. The community name is the communityname of the SNMP management server

5. Click the Security tab, here we set the security for various communities that this agent supports and the level permissions they are allowed namely “Notify”, “READ ONLY”, “READ WRITE”, “READ CREATE”. “Read Write” is the maximum allowed permission wherein we allow the SNMP Management station to make changes to the system or even manage the system using SNMP while “READ ONLY” will only allow the SNMP server to query for event informations and cannot make any changes.

6. Also, for security reasons select “Accept SNMP Packets from these hosts” and add list of authorised servers that can poll this agent.

7. You can also check the box “Send authentication trap” to notify all SNMP servers in the list should there be an authentication failure from any other SNMP server not in the list.

8. Click Apply and OK.

8. Right-click on the service and select “restart” for the changes to take effect.

This should setup SNMP Agent as well as the Trap setup for SNMP.