Patent ID: 7898939

Claim:
A method for monitoring devices with changing Internet protocol (IP) addresses, comprising: receiving SNMP trap from a remote device at a first IP address to notify that a connection is up; in response to receiving the SNMP trap from the device, transmitting an SNMP poll to the device to obtain an identifier for the device; corresponding the first IP address to the identifier for the device; transmitting a sequence of SNMP GET requests at predetermined time periods to the device, wherein a corresponding sequence of SNMP GET responses are transmitted back from the device; in response to failing to receive from the device a predetermined and tunable number of consecutive SNMP GET responses equal to a predetermined threshold, determining that there is a connection failure or a device failure; in response to determining that there is the failure, checking whether the device is in a maintenance window; and in response to determining that there is the failure, waiting a predetermined and tunable window for the device to reconnect to a network and to send another SNMP trap from the device notifying that a connection is back up, wherein the device has a second IP address and the same identifier; further comprising at least one of: in response to determining that the device is in the maintenance window or is back up within the predetermined and tunable time window, generating no trouble ticket; in response to determining that the device is not in the maintenance window and is not back up within the predetermined and tunable time window, generating a trouble ticket for the device; and in response to determining that the device having the same identifier is reconnected to the network within the predetermined and tunable time window, causing no trouble ticket to be generated.