snmp traps with intermediate file - why?

[tvtue]

Hello all,

the manual (http://www.zabbix.com/documentation/...types/snmptrap) describes the workflow how snmp traps are beeing received. The snmptrapd get it, hands it over to a perl script or to snmptt. Then one or the other writes the trap to a SNMPTrapperFile which in turn is read by the zabbix server.

Can someone explain to me why this step "writing to a SNMPTrapperFile" is beeing done? Couldn't the snmptrapd hand the trap directly over to the zabbix server?

As far as I understood snmp traps they are a kind of a trigger and putting them in a file which is beeing polled by the zabbix server just goes against this nature.

TIA
tvtue

[BDiE8VNy]

The documentaion of SNMPTT actually says it all:

A more descriptive / friendly trap message can be created using SNMPTT's variable substitution.
[...]
In addition to variable substitution, SNMPTT allows complex configurations allowing:

• the ability to accept or reject a trap based on the host name, ip address, network range, or variable values inside of the trap enterprise variables
• execute external programs to send pages, emails etc
• perform regular expression search and replace on the translated message such as translating the variable value "Building alarm 4" to "Moisture detection alarm"

For the full range of features see: SNMPTT.CONF Configuration file format