Polling and SNMP traps

About this task

Because SNMP uses an unreliable transport protocol (UDP), IBM Workload Scheduler/NetView does not rely on SNMP traps to indicate the status of its symbols. The manager polls its agents periodically, requesting specific MIB values. The returned values are compared with those returned by the previous poll, and differences are indicated as status changes in IBM Workload Scheduler/NetView symbols. The default polling interval is one minute. See IBM Workload Scheduler/NetView configuration options for information about changing the polling interval.

To obtain critical process status, the manager polls all of its agents. For job scheduling status, the manager determines which of its agents is most likely to have the required information, and polls only that agent. The choice is made in the following order of precedence:
  1. The agent running on the HCL Workload Automation master
  2. The agent running on a HCL Workload Automation backup master
  3. The agent running on any HCL Workload Automation fault-tolerant agent that has full status on in its workstation definition
Enabling traps provides the following advantages:
  1. Event-specific variables are included with each trap
  2. Traps are logged in NetView's event log.
If job abend traps (101) are enabled, for example, sufficient information is collected to identify an abended job, its schedule, and the workstation on which it runs. This is useful when deciding what actions to take to remedy a problem.
You might choose to disable some or all of the IBM Workload Scheduler/NetView traps for the following reasons:
  1. To reduce network traffic
  2. To prevent NetView® user's from receiving logged events that are not relevant

For more information about the Unison Software's enterprise-specific traps and their variables, see Re-configuring enterprise-specific traps.