Net-SNMP version 3 and OpenNMS

To monitor your systems you rely heavily on SNMP, it gives out of the box a lot of possibilities getting important performance and status information. The main topic security is often not considered. SNMP version 1 and 2c transmit everything in plain text over the wire. There is also no user, password authentication method, just a shared community string which gives access to the information. To address these problems SNMP v3 was introduced. Continue reading

SNMP vs. Prometheus – On The Wire

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

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

Scanning for SNMP communities

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

Cleaner log with Docker and SNMP

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