Unreliable SNMP monitoring in Atera lately?

frank.pietersma

Lately I noticed there are lots of false positives in SNMP monitoring.
Several QNAP NAS devices reported diskspace beyond threshold (disk almost full). But when I checked there is no issue.
NAS devices reporting upgrade available (value=1) but no alert in Atera
Fortigate firewalls reporting unable to monitor cpu usage but there is no issue.
This happens on multiple devices at multiple clients so it hardly can be a coincidence.

I'm starting to worry SNMP monitoring is not that stable as it should be.

Obviously I will open a support case. Just wondering if anyone else is noticing false positives or no alerts where there should be one. I will share the screenshots of one particular NAS device.

1) All available alerts in Atera for the NAS device:

2) The actual available disk space.

3) The device is reporting a upgrade is available but no alert in Atera.

setting configured:

SNMP is reporting the right value but no alert:

frank.pietersma

More examples:

tanderson

@frank.pietersma We have gone back and forth with SNMP setup over the past year, and we have pretty consistently found they were a bigger waste of time than anything, from the time it takes to set up and the false alerts that seem to be generated.

I hope it will be much easier to configure and work more reliably one day, but from our experience, that day is still not here, and ultimately we have disabled SNMP monitoring.

nina

Hi @frank.pietersma - I have opened a ticket for you!

brendan.richman

Also having trouble with this. No alert will be generated at all if device availability monitoring is turned off - I don't need to be alerted if a printer is turned off, but I do need to be alerted if the toner is low. So I'm stuck between receiving no alerts at all, or irrelevant alerts clogging my inbox. (FYI it took support multiple days and a lot of back, forth and escalation helping them figure this out, surely this behaviour should be documented somewhere for easy reference by your support team?).

When I did finally get an email alert for it, the description of the OID wasn't included so I had to go from the email back into Atera to investigate which toner needs replacing.

I don't feel like it would take that much to get right. But instead we get AI-generated response on ticket replies which I'm fairly certain nobody asked for. The core functionality is starting to crumble in favour of cosmetic tweaks. I'm start to become frustrated with the product, and see competitors quickly catching up.

nina

https://community.atera.com/discussion/comment/1047#Comment_1047

Hi @brendan.richman - I have opened a Support Ticket for you, #417628.

yasminproduct16

Hi guys,

I'm sorry that you're experiencing trouble with the SNMP monitoring.
I'd love to jump on a call to hear your needs and try to help.
Can you shoot me an email to yasmin@atera.com?

frank.pietersma

We would really like to use this features.
SNMP is important for monitoring critical hardware infrastructure.
I reported the false positives 3 months ago in a ticket and since then we monitor disk space manually.
Yes I know it sounds crazy. We cannot not keep this up forever.
Would be great if we saw a little progress here.

[Deleted User]

@brendan.richman " don't feel like it would take that much to get right. But instead we get AI-generated response on ticket replies which I'm fairly certain nobody asked for. The core functionality is starting to crumble in favour of cosmetic tweaks. I'm start to become frustrated with the product, and see competitors quickly catching up."

I whole heartedly agree with you - but they are just not listening. They make all the right noises, saying they will address things, but years on, certain core functions still just do not work.

frank.pietersma

I have dealt with Atera on multiple occasions regarding technical issues.
All were things that should work as standard feature but simply didn't.
In all cases, it took a long time, but to be fair, they did resolve them in all instances.

It often took a while for them to them to realize that there was indeed a real problem. Things usually started rolling once they did. I hope that now this is the case as well.
Our posts here will most certainly help to get the train running.

From the start SNMP functionality has been a bit of a concern. I will give some examples:
- Not being able to import MIB's is cumbersome and therefore setting up SNMP devices is very time consuming.
- The non recurring (one time) alert in case of e.g. a disk failure is totally not understandable and very risky. Once someone missed the first (and only) alert nobody ever gets notified that disks are down.
- The false positives on top of this are raising concerns.
- The new AI functionality does not work correct and creates non working OID's

It has now been promised multiple times that SNMP features are being worked on, and honestly, I think it's time we start seeing some progress. SNMP monitoring is too important not to use.

Atera wants to grow and become a more important player in the market. It has all the possibilities to do so and I sincerely hope they see these kind of things as opportunities to do so.

We all get better if Atera does ;-)

brendan.richman

Raised a support request this morning (429026), but thought I'd put it here too in case anyone has the same issue.

I have a device I’m monitoring via SNMP which generated a communication error a month ago and hasn’t been seen online since.

I added another device, setup identically with the same monitoring agent and name which reports as online.

What’s going on? Why does the original device report as offline when it is clearly online, and the same monitoring agent reports it as online as a different device.

Nothing has changed in terms of setup, but I’m becoming increasingly frustrated by the unreliability of SNMP monitoring.

frank.pietersma

@brendan.richman Exactly. SNMP monitoring is too important to just accept it is what it is.
It's about time that Atera put this on the agenda.

As I see it now is that SNMP monitoring in Atera is missing necessary features and is unreliable.
Looking at the competition Atera is missing the boat here.

Before someone is going to open a ticket for me: Already had multiple tickets open.
It is not a bug. It is a flaw in the design that needs to be addressed.

vkeven

Samething here , not working correctly

accounts

SNMP monitoring for HPE servers is extremely hit and miss.

gilgi

@accounts would you mind sharing more info?
I want to understand if this is a bug that I can loop in support, or a feature gap