Serious SNMP support in Zabbix?

[netmon]

Dear all,

I'm using Zabbix for about 48h now, so not much experience.
Anyway I had to find out, that Zabbix has no serious support for SNMP.

While zabbix can perfectly query SNMP v1/2/3 Devices, there is no easy way to create Items for SNMP OIDs/whole MIBs.

There are some addons like the SNMP_Builder integration into the GUI, and the zload_snmpwalk.pl script, but my impression is, that the zabbix developer team doesn't really care about SNMP.

The situation for SNMP Traps seems to be even worse. As far as I was able to see, there is no trap receiver provided/maintained by the zabbix developer team.

IMHO this is a very bad situation and it doesnt seem that it will be improved with Zabbix 2.0.

I belive a serious Network Monitoring Solution should have outstanding support for SNMP. This is the defacto industry standard to manage and monitor all inter-networking equipment. And Agents are pretty useless for most of these devices.

Can somebody tell me, that I am wrong about this?
Is it planed to improve this situation?

[richlv]

some graphical snmp template building helpers would be nice to have, but those who have knowledge about the monitored devices usually can create the needed templates

as for snmp trap handling, 2.0 will have a more integrated solution (which should also perform much better) - see http://www.zabbix.com/documentation/...types/snmptrap for more detail. you might want to set up beta builds of 1.9 and play with this feature - feedback would be appreciated

[netmon]

richlv, thank you for your reply.

I was thinking about trying 1.9. Maybe I will, if I find the time to do it.
My first try will be http://www.zabbix.com/wiki/howto/mon...a_new_solution.

I don't consider to have graphical ways to build SNMP Items (Browsing a MIB / Device via snmpwalk and selecting what you need) "nice to have", I belive this is mandatory for a serious Network Monitoring Solution.
It's not that I'm not able to build the Templates (Items with SNMP) in XML myself (i.e. with help of zload_snmpwalk) but it is always easy if you know what you are doing. For non-expert users it will be hard however.

Of course there are always strength and weaknesses of a product/software, maybe this is a weakness, but worth to work on IMHO.

I'll continue now with my first zabbix installation...
:-)

[ahowell]

richlv, thank you for your reply.

I was thinking about trying 1.9. Maybe I will, if I find the time to do it.
My first try will be http://www.zabbix.com/wiki/howto/mon...a_new_solution.

I don't consider to have graphical ways to build SNMP Items (Browsing a MIB / Device via snmpwalk and selecting what you need) "nice to have", I belive this is mandatory for a serious Network Monitoring Solution.
It's not that I'm not able to build the Templates (Items with SNMP) in XML myself (i.e. with help of zload_snmpwalk) but it is always easy if you know what you are doing. For non-expert users it will be hard however.

Of course there are always strength and weaknesses of a product/software, maybe this is a weakness, but worth to work on IMHO.

I'll continue now with my first zabbix installation...
:-)

What do you mean by creating templates in XML. You just create items through the web interface. It's very easy. Browsing a MIB would be nice however, but considering you only need to create templates once, it's not big a deal.

[richlv]

richlv, thank you for your reply.

I was thinking about trying 1.9. Maybe I will, if I find the time to do it.
My first try will be http://www.zabbix.com/wiki/howto/mon...a_new_solution.

note that 1.9 has that new built-in trap parsing thingie

...
but it is always easy if you know what you are doing. For non-expert users it will be hard however.

this reminds me of somebody complaining that zabbix requires understanding the system they want to monitor =)

[netmon]

What do you mean by creating templates in XML. You just create items through the web interface. It's very easy. Browsing a MIB would be nice however, but considering you only need to create templates once, it's not big a deal.

Well, I create templates in XML which I later import into zabbix. Basically this XML has the format of an exported template. :-)
I used a modified (customised) version of zload_snmpwalk for this.
This is much easier then creating ~150 SNMP Items through the WebUI.

this reminds me of somebody complaining that zabbix requires understanding the system they want to monitor =)

richlv, I think I understand what you mean. :-)
Still I believe it should be more easy to acomplish the task of creating a lot of SNMP Items (for the average user). Personally I'm fine with the perl script I used...
SNMP Traps is another thing, but as you already wrote, from 1.9(2.0) it will be easier.

[ahowell]

Well, I create templates in XML which I later import into zabbix. Basically this XML has the format of an exported template. :-)
I used a modified (customised) version of zload_snmpwalk for this.
This is much easier then creating ~150 SNMP Items through the WebUI.

Low level discovery in 1.9 makes this a lot easier too.

[richlv]

Low level discovery in 1.9 makes this a lot easier too.

yes, that's a good point - netmon, if you are interested in this, try out trunk - no need to create separate items for all filesystems or network interfaces manually anymore

[ahowell]

yes, that's a good point - netmon, if you are interested in this, try out trunk - no need to create separate items for all filesystems or network interfaces manually anymore

SNMP too depending on the OID (whether it is indexed)

[ericgearhart]

While zabbix can perfectly query SNMP v1/2/3 Devices, there is no easy way to create Items for SNMP OIDs/whole MIBs.

There are some addons like the SNMP_Builder integration into the GUI, and the zload_snmpwalk.pl script, but my impression is, that the zabbix developer team doesn't really care about SNMP.

Just wanted to throw my 2 cents in that I agree completely with this thread... when I can throw Cacti at a switch and it can walk the device and have graphs built in literally like 10 minutes, Zabbix becomes a hard sell.

If Zabbix would/could basically just go steal the ease in which Cacti makes it so stupid easy to walk a switch/router/whatever and have graphs built, it would become a de facto network monitoring solution for me :/

At the very least, please, please PLEASE provide an officially supported way to walk a device and generate items/graphs

[ericgearhart]

For those reading this thread, take a look here:
http://www.zabbix.com/documentation/...evel_discovery

(particularly take a look at section 3.3, "Discovery of SNMP OID's")

I'm literally installing a Zabbix 1.9.9 VM right now and test driving low level discovery... if it works like the docs make it sound like it works, then finally SNMP will be a "first class citizen" in my eyes

[netmon]

low level discovery

hi again!

After reading about 2.0's features (especially low level discovery), I decided to go to the 2.0 beta to test it out.
My first try was 1.9.9 from the common download page, but I had too much trouble with its bugs. Especially importing my 1.8.10 templates to 1.9.9 didn't work well. For instance all triggers failed to import.

Well, looking forward: Pre-1.9.10.x (alpha).
To be exact:

# zabbix_server -V
Zabbix server v1.9.10 (revision 25576) (01 February 2012)

It worked better...! :-)

Now to the interesting part: SNMP low level discovery

I tried the example from the 2.0 documentation, works well.
But there is a problem with most Devices I have to monitor.

SNMP Low Level Discovery works by doing an SNMPWALK (SNMP GETNEXT) on the defined OID of the Discovery Rule. This is fine.
For this ifDescr example from the docs it would do an snmpwalk of .1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.2
The device will return with:
.1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.2.1
.1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.2.2
.1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.2.n

My problem:
The SNMP OIDs I need to discover work differently.
Those are structured like this:
.1.3.6.x.y.z.1.0
.1.3.6.x.y.z.2.0
.1.3.6.x.y.z.3.0
.1.3.6.x.y.z.n.0

If I put in .1.3.6.x.y.z as the OID for the Discovery Rule it will only discover .0 (last part of the OID).

It seems like Low Level Discovery for SNMP assumes that the SNMPINDEX is always the last value of the OID.
If this is the case that will be a problem for some vendor implementations.

Maybe I missed something?

[netmon]

Fixed:


Advanced SNMP LLD - Dynamic Indexes

https://github.com/simonkowallik/Zabbix-Addons