monitoring snmp agents

[justin4dti]

Hi,

How does zabbix_server know howto poll net-snmp agents (and other v1 & v2 compliant agents)? Specifically I mean their community strings. I was expecting something in the conf files where you define a string based on ip, or subnet, etc. and have Discovery go out, try port 161, try a string, try another, move on ...

[justin4dti]

Lunch

OK, I went to lunch and thought about how Zabbix is doing this totally different than OpenNMS and InfoVista.

So Zabbix doesn't discover net-snmp agents per se, and the community strings are entered on a per Item basis. What this means is I should clone Items that need a community string (because Zabbix doesn't have a global string that can be set) and I should link an SNMP Template to Hosts that are discovered with Service Port 161 OR SNMP Agent v2. But the later doesn't work; the Hosts running net-snmp are linked to a non-snmp template and listed as using the Zabbix Agent port when we don't have it installed. I'm curious about what Discovery means when Zabbix says it "checks SNMPv2 agent (161)". It must just be checking for the port to be open and listening because it can't be walking the agent with a string yet. It seems like Zabbix doesn't really know a difference between checking TCP Service Port 161 vs. SNMPv2 agent (161) but it does (somehow) know the difference between a v1 agent. How?! You're going to have to give the other end a valid ro string at least or it flat out rejects the walk!