I've been asked to monitor an enterprise application, has anyone done this with snmp?

Greetings,

I work along side a team that are developing an enterprise application. The application is spread across many different systems, some are vm's, some that are containerized in the cloud behind security systems. We have full control of our application, and we can work to develop enough of a "MIB" or "MIB-Like" structure of counters and gauges for our application. So this is the theoretical goal.

Has anyone developed a custom SNMP stack to expose application KPI's to Solarwinds? I know what to do with the custom pollers once we have something sharing data. But I'm wondering if there are any useful resources on the care and feeding of a custom snmpd daemon out there somewhere? I know I can probably build snmpd for linux, and work with each application component developer to populate it with counters and gauge data... but I can't find anything (yet) where someone has done what I am trying to do. Has anyone here done anything like this? Is there another way to move the data into SolarWinds that might be better than SNMP?

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Accepted answers

mesverrum

I have to say if you are doing green field app development you COULD do SNMP, but most people might consider a REST API with a Json output to be more typical of modern software. Under the covers it's going to basically end up being almost the same result, but SNMP is a bit more rigid than JSON.

keoki

There is a Net-SNMP tutorial that covers using the Net-SNMP standard linux packlage, and to deploy a mib and build agentx subagents.

Also there are python libraries as well, which is going to be useful in containerized applications where deploying net-snmp might not be doable.

All comments

keoki

So I am still researching this... But so far I think I have found out a little more about how this is to be accomplished.

Essentially you need a master agent on a server that listens the SNMP ports and serves up a database of OID's.

Then you need to deploy subagents inside of your applications to collect data to feed to the master agent using the AgentX protocol that was designed for this purpose. Anyone out there do anything like this yet?

mesverrum

keoki

There is a Net-SNMP tutorial that covers using the Net-SNMP standard linux packlage, and to deploy a mib and build agentx subagents.

Also there are python libraries as well, which is going to be useful in containerized applications where deploying net-snmp might not be doable.

keoki

That's interesting. It is not how *I* would do it, but my developers will likely tell me it is how *they* would...

Jfrazier

Part of the challenge that would be faced is what happens when resources are scarce? UDP is one of the first protocols dropped. SNMP is a fire and forget protocol. You have no validation the request makes it to the target. Then you have to create different tooling to fit different environments where you may not have the ability to put SNMP agents. As mentioned below a REST API would make better sense as you would have a secure communication back and forth. That becomes more scalable and maintainable across multiple environments.

keoki

Makes perfect sense. I simply had not yet done restful polling for telemetry, so it wasn't a method that came to mind. However I /have/ been posting data to rest API's from SolarWinds, so I was half way there.