A BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) can be reported "Down" even though it is running and GSX Monitor displays SNMP time-out related errors in the main view. This is usually caused by high network latency while retrieving the BlackBerry Services information via SNMP.
This article shows how to modify the SNMP time-out and retry scan settings to work around the issue in environments with high network latency.
Symptoms
- A callback time-out occurred.
- Some BlackBerry Services reported as not running.
Possible Workaround
The parameters that we will modify are the retry and time-out settings for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). These settings are used to determine how long GSX Monitor waits for the results before it aborts the connection. The first setting determines how many times GSX Monitor attempts to retrieve data using SNMP, and the second option is how long in seconds it waits for a response. The standard settings are to allow 300 seconds (5 minutes) for any request to complete, and to try a maximum of 3 times before declaring the connection down.
The following workaround may help with monitoring BES from within a high latency network environment, but will never replace reliable network connectivity. If you are still receiving time-out errors after applying changes listed in the procedure below, it may prove beneficial to deploy a Monitoring Station closer to the target BES servers.
Adjust the SNMP time-out and retry settings for BES SNMP scanning:
- Shut down GSX Monitor including all background processes.
- Navigate to the GSX Monitor\Data\ folder.
- Edit the GSXScanEngine.ini file.
- Locate the [OPTIONS] section:
- If the BESOPTIONS line already exists, add the following at the end of the line: ;SNMP_RETRIES=10;SNMP_TIMEOUT=500, and make sure all entries are separated by a semicolon.
- If the BESOPTIONS line does not exist, add BESOPTIONS=SNMP_RETRIES=10;SNMP_TIMEOUT=500 anywhere in the [OPTIONS] section.
- Save and Close the file.
- Restart GSX Monitor including the Windows Service to load changes.
The default values are:
SNMP_RETRIES: 3
SNMP_TIMEOUT: 300
GSX Monitor scans BlackBerry Services status via an SNMP Walk. The request checks that BES related processes are in the list of all Windows processes currently running to determine the BES Application status. If it times out, then GSX Monitor considers the BES Application as down, as we are not able to retrieve the status for BES Services.
Related articles
- What is SNMP from Microsoft Technet
- More details on User Datagram Protocol (UDP) from Microsoft Technet