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Adding Useful Device Asset Metadata from the ENTITY-MIB into SevOne NMS

By Tim Greenside posted 27 days ago

  

Introduction

Device “metadata” is useful descriptive information that you can associate with a device that makes managing devices easier.  SNMP provides us with some basic metadata in the “system” branch of the MIB-II SNMP tree – sysName, sysDescription, sysContact.  That’s great, but when it comes to maintenance of devices, usually the network engineer is left wanting more. 

That’s where the ENTITY-MIB comes in handy.

What is the ENTITY-MIB and what does it offer?

The Entity MIB is part of the MIB-II SNMP tree. 

It provides a standardized way to query a device for asset information, such as: 

  • manufacturer name,
  • model name
  • serial number
  • hardware/software/firmware versions installed

 

How do I access it for a device?

You can query the ENTITY-MIB entries for a device using the snmpwalk tool within IBM’s SevOne NMS or from the command line. 

When you query the ENTITY-MIB for the first time, you will see that it returns all sorts of asset information about the device and its modules and hardware components. 

In our example, we are really interested in overall device asset information vs. individual component.  To retrieve this info, we need to first identify the “physical class” of the device’s chassis in order to get its SNMP index number. 

SNMP uses index numbers as unique identifiers allowing us to request only the data for a specific component instead of having to look at the entire lot. 

Using IBM SevOne NMS’ snmpwalk tool, we can walk the “entPhysicalClass” portion of the ENTITY-MIB tree to retrieve the various classes of device asset components.  We are looking specifically for the “chassis” class type.  You can see that for this device it is located at index 1 of the table.  So, now when we want to query for other MIB values such as Serial Number, we can do so using index 1 so that the device returns the serial number for the chassis.

You will notice that all of the MIB value indexes have the same unique index “.1” appended to each line in order to retrieve the related information:

 

NOTE:  Depending on the vendor and device, all fields may or may not be populated with values.

How do I make use of it in IBM SevOne NMS?

IBM SevOne NMS provides you with the ability to define metadata namespaces and attributes so that you can then populate the attributes with useful information about the device.  While you can add attribute values manually, that is not practical in a production environment where you might have hundreds or thousands of devices.  Luckily, IBM SevOne NMS has a very robust RESTful API interface, allowing us to automate the updating of the metadata attribute values.

While you can use python to write a script to access the SevOne RESTful API, a newer modern approach would be to use IBM’s Rapid Infrastructure Automation solution, which allows you to accomplish this task via low-code action block workflows. 

For this example, I have utilized two workflows that are published under the IBM SevOne NPM community.  The community is free to access.  I encourage you to check it out!

Here are the links to the workflows used for this example:

[1] The first workflow retrieves a list of devices from IBM SevOne NPM and then retrieves the ENTITY-MIB metrics and writes them to a CSV file on the NMS.

[2] The second workflow retrieves the CSV file from the NMS and reads its contents back into IBM SevOne NPM to populate a metadata device namespace called “ENTITY-MIB”.

Once you download the workflows, you can import them into IBM Rapid Infrastructure Automation and then run them to populate the metadata into the system.  Then you can add them to your reports within IBM SevOne Data Insight, wherever metadata can be used.

Here’s the example metadata namespace schema that is added to the NMS:

Here’s an example report in Data Insight displaying the metadata from the ENTITY-MIB for each device:

 


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