Multiple SNMP communities per host (via SNMP agent)?

[nicklockhart-fullfibre]

Hello all,

I'm trying to monitor certain network hardware via SNMP in Zabbix.

Due to how our hardware is configured, we need to use two communities for each host.

I can create a second SNMP agent just fine, but it seems like discovery rules are limited to one SNMP agent per rule.



Is it possible to create a discovery rule (or discovery prototype) that will allow for the same rule to execute against multiple SNMP agents per host?

(I understand that the ideal solution would be to reconfigure the hardware to report all information from a single community, but for various factors beyond my control, this is not possible.)

[troffasky]

All those years I spent complaining that old versions of Zabbix were so complicated because each item had an SNMP community parameter, now I found the guy who needed it
Might be easier just to configure a host for each community and apply the templates as required.

[cyber]

What is this evil magic? A 2FA for SNMP?

[nicklockhart-fullfibre]

All those years I spent complaining that old versions of Zabbix were so complicated because each item had an SNMP community parameter, now I found the guy who needed it
Might be easier just to configure a host for each community and apply the templates as required.

Heh, just my luck that I get into Zabbix after that was removed
I had heard about that solution - one host per SNMP community - and was trying to avoid it (we have a few dozen of these), but if that's the way it has to be done, I'll go with that.

What is this evil magic? A 2FA for SNMP?

Very stubborn network equipment that doesn't like to tell you everything at once. It exposes stats on some network interfaces via one "context" (not SNMPv3, different type of context configured on the device side) but not all of them. If you use a different context, you get stats on a different set of network interfaces... but not including the interfaces from the first context. We've done some experimentation but it doesn't look like there's a way to configure a single context that gives you everything. To be fair, from what I've heard, the vendor isn't exactly a fan of third-party monitoring platforms, and would rather you used their proprietary monitoring platform... which leads to silly hacks like "we need to query two different communities to get everything, and no we can't configure one community to get everything".

Not a fan of all this, but this was all set up and installed long before I got here, and after all, I'm just the guy in charge of setting up the network monitoring...

[cyber]

/facepalm, that is one f.. ed up way of doing things..