When we visit our local doctor, sometimes we don’t always agree with what they have to say. Sure, we didn’t go to medical school and we don’t have a fancy degree on our wall. But heck, it’s our body and once in a while we know something just isn’t right. So what do we do? We get a second opinion. The same concept is important in almost any part of life – even network management. Sometimes something just doesn’t seem right, and we need to get a second opinion before we blindly trust what our hardware and software is telling us.

For years, Plixer (yes, even in our Somix days) has been using an excellent free tool called GetIf for walking MIBs and verifying SNMP information. It allows support technicians and users to verify device settings and configurations. It’s important to have these small, but incredibly useful, tools on hand. Whenever something doesn’t go as planned during setup, the first question to ask is always, “Is it the software or is it the hardware?” When helping customers and evaluators setup Denika Performance Trender to monitor their SNMP enabled devices, GetIf has always been invaluable in helping answer that question.

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Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
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Need a quick check of bandwidth utilization on a router interface? How about SNMP Traffic Grapher (STG)? It’s available for free download on our support site under Free Tools.

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If I got a nickel for everytime I’ve seen the symptoms shown below…I could afford to be in the Bahamas right now. But instead, I get the joy of watching all the weather alerts for the state of Maine about the incoming Nor’ Easter. *sigh*

I’m sure many of you may recognize the behavior shown in the above screenshot. You have your devices discovered by Scrutinizer, but there’s no way to know what interface it’s trending because all you see are numbers. This blog may help you out with this issue.

When you discover a device, Scrutinizer attempts to do an SNMP GET to grab definitions for the following:
- Name of the device
- Descriptions of the interfaces
- Port speed associated with each interface.

If you didn’t create a credential in Scrutinizer for your personalized community string prior to the initial discovery, then Scrutinizer would have attempted the discovery using the PUBLIC community string, and you’d be seeing symptoms much like the screenshot shows. Just a bunch of numbers…no details.

If you are certain that you are using the correct community string and yet running an SNMP update still doesn’t work, I would suggest downloading a MIB Browser called GETIF.

GETIF is a really nice 3rd party tool that I use here in the office to diagnose problems such as this.
With GETIF; just provide the IP address of the device in question, the community string that the device should be using and it will test SNMP connectivity using a generic OID.
If GETIF is able to return a value for that OID, then we know the community string that you have defined is correct. Which would turn our focus to Scrutinizer and the credential you created.
If however, GETIF fails to return a value, then we know there’s an issue with the community string that you are using.

Here’s the link to download GETIF from our website.

-Nate