SNMP Agents...

In the past couple of weeks, I have been doing a bit of research concerning the Agent and sub-Agent capabilities around the Net-SNMP agent distribution. As part of my research, I came to the startling conclusion that most of the applications commonly found in Enterprises, have available sub-agents that are readily available either from the vendors or in Open source.

My first site I went to provided a series of Net-SNMP specific sub-agents and linkages to those. This list can be reviewed at:

http://www.net-snmp.org/wiki/index.php/Net-snmp_extensions

In the list I noticed sub-agents for elements listed in the requirements in the agent specific section. For example, Jasmin implements the IETF Script MIB using Java as the script language. Jasmin is available through :

http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/jasmin/README.html

I find Jasmin intruiging in that Java programmers are prolific bunch! You can find them everywhere! It would be interesting to see what a good Java purist could come up with on an agent extension given that SNMP is supposed to be lightweight - very tightly done code. And Java, because of the JVM up front, tends to not be so "lightweight".

What if you could use Jasmin to leverage Java Web Start to dynamically add and update sub-agents?

Interestingly enough, I also ran across Ramon, an open source implementation of RMON2! Ramon data can be found here:

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/ramon/

I wonder what overhead it introduces on a hosts IP stack. Could this be used in conjuction with old hardware to provide some very interesting data sets for a given enterprise on a nice, operational price point?

And another, very pertinent sub-agent I found is this one for VMWare at:

http://www.vmware.com/support/esx21/doc/esx21admin_snmpagents.html

If you're working with VMWare and vSphere in Cloud environmentsa, this presents some very interesting possibilities. While I doubt the sub-agent is up to speed on the latest ESX version, more adoption would drive that priority.

In the following table, I list the applications verbatim from the requirements. I’ve also plugged in direct or indirect references to sub-agent capabilities.


Applications Sub-Agent Source
Web Servers
Apache http://mod-apache-snmp.sourceforge.net/english/docs.htm
WebLogic http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13222_01/wls/docs81/snmpman/index.html
WebSphere http://www.webnms.com/snmpadaptor/datasheet.html
http://www.pcuniverse.com/IBM-WebSphere-Transformation-Extender-SNMP-Collection-v.-8.2-media-CD/BA0NSEN/pd/p4740071
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v3r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.itcamwas.doc/cynmst464.htm

IIS http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/4a168955-4982-44d5-8a18-e252d37a3557.mspx?mfr=true


Web Application Servers
J2EE http://blogs.sun.com/orivat/entry/glassfish_snmp_j2ee_mib_presentation
Jboss http://community.jboss.org/wiki/JBossSNMPAdapter

.NET http://www.webnms.com/net-snmp/index.html

Tomcat http://www.opennms.org/index.php/Tomcat_5.5_JMX_How-To
http://forums.adventnet.com/viewtopic.php?t=959&start=0
http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/usermanual/build-monitor-test-plan.html


LDAP

MS Active Directory http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc783142(WS.10).aspx

OpenLDAP http://ostatic.com/netsitter

Sun LDAP http://docs.sun.com/source/816-6698-10/snmp.html


Relational Database Servers
Oracle http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/em.920/a96672/toc.htm
Sybase http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/em.920/a96672/toc.htm

DB2 http://bytes.com/topic/db2/answers/181104-db2-snmp-support-v8

SQL Server http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd316347.aspx

SQL Server Cluster http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd316347.aspx

Informix http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/idshelp/v10/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.snmp.doc/snmp35.htm

MySQL http://mysqldump.azundris.com/archives/63-Sysadmins-Nightly-Mental-Pain-SNMP.html

PostgresQL http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgsnmpd


Email
Exchange http://www.oidview.com/mibs/311/WINDOWS-NT-PERFORMANCE-EXCHANGE.html

POP/IMAP http://netilium.org/~mad/technotes/postfixstat/

SMTP http://netilium.org/~mad/technotes/postfixstat/


DNS Servers
Bind http://www.packetmischief.ca/network/monitoring/bind9/
http://www.l3jane.net/wiki/factory:projects:b9agent_en

Active Directory http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc783142(WS.10).aspx

MS DHCP Server http://www.oidview.com/mibs/311/DHCP-MIB.html



MS SCOM http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/operationsmanager/en/us/default.aspx
MS SMS http://microsoft-sms-network-monitor.software.informer.com/
http://www.dlldll.com/snmpelea.dll_download.html

MS Radius http://support.microsoft.com/kb/237295

MS RAS http://software.informer.com/getfree-snmp-mibs-microsoft-ras-vpn/


My take:

Let's face it. Everyone is watching every penny in the IT budget. Why not leverage this technology?