SNMP discovery OID

[erore]

I am quite confused about snmp monitoring. Zabbix offers the snmp discovery feature but I fail to see its use as it requires the knowledge of OIDs. Should it not be the discovery rule that discovers the OIDs of the devices that support SNMP.

From the manual the correct procedure to monitor SNMP devices should be first snmpwalk the device, get OID and set it up in zabbix. Is there no plan to automate this function so that zabbix discovers the items just as snmpwalk? Or have I missed something? I cannot believe that admins have the time for such painful manual work.

[aib]

You will be surprised, but yes.
Almost all network administrator can easily juggle with SNMP OID.

Unfortunately, the SNMP protocol have so many extensions that every manufacturer use his own extension with specific OID branch to collect and present information from device.
Sometimes even the different models of network devices (from the same manufacturer) can have the different branches of OID.

Because of that it's hard to implement the fully automatic process of SNMP discovering.

But!

You can use the library of Zabbix Templates - https://www.zabbix.com/wiki/templates/start

[erore]

But the oids are in the output of snmpget which can be fed from snmpwalk. I mean the whole manual process is so repetitive and I cannot understand why it cannot be automated; the algorithm is pretty well defined. So where is a problem?

Regarding templates, they mostly do not work. Most often they even cannot be imported - probably because they are made for older version zabbix. When they can, they are not available for my devices (cisco switches for example). Also if the template is imported and used it creates lots of items that are not supported on the device (why does zabbix not ask the device which of those are supported?).

(I am just curious to understand the process better; I do not want to be rude.)

[dirckcopeland]

SNMP discovery OID

Erore,
You make very good points, but after looking at the Autodiscovery feature (I'm running v2.2.2), I find it does save a lot of work by using such features as
ifInOctets.["{#SNMPINDEX}"]
for a key and
ifInOctets.{#SNMPINDEX}
for an OID as described in the documentation. In my case I have 21 virtual interfaces that this 1 item prototype takes care of all of them. Like Aib says, once you start working with SNMP and getting familiar with the approach, it does take at least some of the work if you were to create all the items manually.

[zabauser]

You will be surprised, but yes.
Almost all network administrator can easily juggle with SNMP OID.

What is the exact meaning of this "yes"? Does it mean "no"?
And no, Almost all network administrators do NOT code in OID. They solve bigger problems than learning these machine numbers.
Only SNMP coders remember all those machine numbers.

You can use the library of Zabbix Templates - https://www.zabbix.com/wiki/templates/start

404 Not Found

[1berto]

In my experience, most of templates don't work (apart from very basic items).
I work in a big company (500.000 +- hosts in total) and of course we use a lot of monitoring tools.
We have some cases in which even a firmware upgrade change the OIDs.
So you can't assume the same OIDs even from the same manufacturer/model.
You need to create (and maintain) your own templates based on manufacturer documentation.