I have been evaluating Zabbix to monitor a large Cisco environment (1000+ devices). Due to the host, item, trigger model Zabbix offers powerful reporting and alerting but is lacking in SNMP and auto-discovery capabilities.
As is common in most networks, groups of devices in the same area use the same SNMP settings (All routers/switches in area A use X and all routers/switches in area B use Y).
Monitoring these devices would require duplicate Items to be defined that change only in SNMP community strings. Also SNMP settings have to be entered for every Item. A typical 48 port access switch = 96 items just to monitor bandwidth = 96 duplications of the same community settings. 288 Items in total because 3 sets of community strings are used on the LAN.
As SNMP is device global, a cleaner solution would be to define SNMP settings at the host or host template level. The items associated with each device would then inherit the correct SNMP settings removing the duplication.
Defining SNMP at the host template level would also simplify device auto-discovery. Scan these network ranges using these device templates. This would sweep the network ranges using SNMP settings defined in the templates and associate based on the returned data. (i.e. 2950T-48 template looks for a SNMP response identifying the device as a 2950T-48)
I'm prepared to work on a share patches to implement SNMP at the host level if this is deemed desirable change.
As is common in most networks, groups of devices in the same area use the same SNMP settings (All routers/switches in area A use X and all routers/switches in area B use Y).
Monitoring these devices would require duplicate Items to be defined that change only in SNMP community strings. Also SNMP settings have to be entered for every Item. A typical 48 port access switch = 96 items just to monitor bandwidth = 96 duplications of the same community settings. 288 Items in total because 3 sets of community strings are used on the LAN.
As SNMP is device global, a cleaner solution would be to define SNMP settings at the host or host template level. The items associated with each device would then inherit the correct SNMP settings removing the duplication.
Defining SNMP at the host template level would also simplify device auto-discovery. Scan these network ranges using these device templates. This would sweep the network ranges using SNMP settings defined in the templates and associate based on the returned data. (i.e. 2950T-48 template looks for a SNMP response identifying the device as a 2950T-48)
I'm prepared to work on a share patches to implement SNMP at the host level if this is deemed desirable change.
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