SNMP vs. Prometheus – On The Wire

2022-11-15 4 min read technology Ronny Trommer

I’ve been working with network monitoring tools for a long time. Working with network devices, there is still today a very high probability you have to deal with SNMP. If you work with modern applications or infrastructure, especially in dynamic environments with containers, you will inevitably run into Prometheus and its ecosystem when you need to design and build monitoring solutions. By design, both agents have different goals in mind. The world was very different when SNMP aimed to be “simple” in 1980 as it was for Prometheus in 2012. Continue reading

He's dead, Jim

2018-07-30 5 min read technology Ronny Trommer

If you operate networks there is a big chance you had to deal with SNMP - the Simple Network Management Protocol. If you ever wondered where it came from, it started with a big bang. On October 27, 1980, there was an unusual occurrence on the ARPANET. For a period of several hours, the network appeared to be unusable, due to what was later diagnosed as a high priority software process running out of control. Continue reading

Monitoring Websites with OpenNMS

2018-07-27 4 min read Tutorial OpenNMS Ronny Trommer

Monitoring websites is a common requirement. Using OpenNMS to monitor websites can be done by using the built in HTTP/HTTPS based monitors. While a “Node” can be pretty much everything in a network, the internal model to monitor something is pretty old-fashioned and static. Monitoring a service requires to assign a service to an IP address. This article describes a pattern how you can monitor web sites with low maintenance and without the need to maintain for each website a monitor which is cumbersome in maintenance. Continue reading

Scanning for SNMP communities

2018-03-02 2 min read Ronny Trommer

Adding devices into monitoring system is easy. Getting all the right SNMP communities for them is harder. People don’t give you the right community string or forget to open firewall ports. If you have to test a lot of IP’s against various IP addresses you can use nmap and a community list file as an input. Be aware you talk about permission to run this test otherwise somebody can get angry when you try to brute-force community strings against their devices. Continue reading

Centralized Logging with Graylog2

2017-11-17 3 min read Ronny Trommer

How many times do you connect with SSH to your remote server and cat, grep, tail and awk through your logs? It probably works for 3 servers and running a handful services, but if you have more, you should definitely spend some time to centralize your logs. I personally prefer Graylog2 which can deal very well with different log formats like GELF, Syslog RFC’s. Just start some listener with the format and forward them to your Graylog2 instance. Continue reading

Cleaner log with Docker and SNMP

2017-05-19 1 min read Ronny Trommer

Centralizing logs is important as soon you have more than 2 servers. In my environment the bare metal is monitored with Net-SNMP and my services are deployed as containers with Docker. All system logs are sent to a Graylog2 instance and I quickly noticed a few ugly entries caused by snmpd. Cannot statfs /run/docker/netns/...: Permission denied You will notice a few of them. First approach try to increase the logging level in /etc/default/snmpd from SNMP daemon with Continue reading

Monitoring DevOps and the Status Quo

2017-03-09 5 min read technology Ronny Trommer

As most of us noticed a few companies changed our perspective how to develop software and deploy them as a service. There are quite a few changes between selling every year a box with 10 CD’s and develop and deliver your software as a service. This article is a collection of thoughts and ideas I had and wanted to be written. Who cares about a version number? User give a shit about version numbers anymore, all what matters needs to be focused on the user. Continue reading