25.1 Overview of the NNMi Northbound interface

The following provides an overview of the NNMi Northbound interface:

The NNMi Northbound interface forwards NNMi management events as SNMPv2c traps to a Northbound application.

The Northbound application might filter, act on, and show the NNMi traps. The Northbound application might also provide tools for accessing the NNMi console in the context of an NNMi trap.
The NNMi Northbound interface can send incident lifecycle state change notifications, incident correlation notifications, and incident deletion notifications to the Northbound application.

In this way, the Northbound application can replicate the results of NNMi causal analysis.
The NNMi Northbound interface can also forward to the Northbound application the SNMP traps that NNMi receives.
The NNMi Northbound interface enables event consolidation in a third-party or custom event consolidator.
The NNMi Northbound interface enriches events with information that can be used to integrate other applications with NNMi.

This chapter uses the following terms:

Northbound application: Any application that can receive and process SNMPv2c traps.
Trap-receiving component: The portion of a Northbound application that receives SNMP traps.

Some applications include a separately installable component that receives SNMP traps and forwards them to another component for processing.

For any Northbound application that does not include such a component, trap-receiving component is synonymous with Northbound application.
NNMi Northbound interface: The NNMi functionality that forwards NNMi incidents as SNMPv2c traps to a Northbound application.
Northbound destination: A configuration of the NNMi Northbound interface that defines the connection to the trap-receiving component of a Northbound application and specifies the types of traps that NNMi will send to that Northbound application.