SNMP monitoring Remote Devices?

[aabramson]

Hi everyone, I'm very interested in Zabbix's feature set, however I'm running into some problems in getting everything working and monitored.


We monitor wireless networks remotely, with all of the devices behind the controller gateway being port-forwarded for SNMP. A typical configuration will look like:

212.xxx.xxx.6 : 161 - Controller Gateway
212.xxx.xxx.6 : 10010 -> 192.168.30.10 : 161 - 3com AP
212.xxx.xxx.6 : 10011 -> 192.168.30.11 : 161 - 3com AP
212.xxx.xxx.6 : 10012 -> 192.168.30.12 : 161 - 3com AP
And so on...


From my understanding, each device will be a "Host" within Zabbix. I can define the IP and port to monitor for each host, so it appears that will be fine.

However, is my understanding correct, that I have to set up a template with items, each one with the SNMP OID's I want to monitor, and define the community string on a per OID basis?

That seems rather complex. Each of our wireless hotspots uses it's own set of community strings. So I need to define the community string over and over for each item being monitored for each device?


Any suggestions?

[troffasky]

Use an XML template generator and import the generated template into Zabbix. That assumes that the OIDs you want to monitor are detected by the template generator of course. If not, you could add the OIDs to the template generator and everybody would benefit.

[aabramson]

Use an XML template generator and import the generated template into Zabbix. That assumes that the OIDs you want to monitor are detected by the template generator of course. If not, you could add the OIDs to the template generator and everybody would benefit.

But then I have to import a template for every device that uses a different community string right?

[troffasky]

Correct. Unfortunately the SNMP community is a per-item rather than a per-host value. Making it per-host is an oft-requested feature.

If the hosts are identical, you could copy the items to each host and do a Mass Update on each host. Alternatively, you could set the community string to be the same on each device.

[aabramson]

Hmm, well we might be able to work around this.



The main reason we're looking at Zabbix is because it uses a mysql database which we can hopefully interface with with our own management application.



Is my understanding correct that I technically just need to insert a new host in to the "hosts" table, and then insert the appropriate items to be monitored into the "items" table, and Zabbix will start monitoring them? Or is there anything else I would need to do.




We already maintain our own database of locations & devices at each location, so we could easily script it so for each device, it inserts all of the items into the items database with the appropriate community strings, etc.

[Cray]

Is my understanding correct that I technically just need to insert a new host in to the "hosts" table, and then insert the appropriate items to be monitored into the "items" table, and Zabbix will start monitoring them? Or is there anything else I would need to do

You might want to add triggers so that you could eventually take some actions based on the trigger(s) status

[troffasky]

Is my understanding correct that I technically just need to insert a new host in to the "hosts" table, and then insert the appropriate items to be monitored into the "items" table, and Zabbix will start monitoring them?

The web front end is just one interface to the Zabbix server. If you can figure out the SQL schema, there's no reason why you can't do what you want with Zabbix. If you come up with a better interface, let us know.