Re: [monit-dev] Feature suggestion: SNMP support in Monit

[Martin Pala]

On Sep 4, 2011, at 6:56 PM, Lior Okman wrote:

> On 09/04/2011 05:08 PM, Martin Pala wrote:
>> Hi Lior,
>> 
>> thank you for explaining the plan, we see the point and undestand that 
>> better SNMP support can be useful in SNMP-oriented environments.
>> 
>> At this point however, we prefer not to integrate Monit with Net-SNMP - our 
>> approach is to keep Monit simple with minimum dependencies on 3rd party 
>> libraries, so if everything fail, monit will keep running and will be able 
>> to report and fix problems.
> Is the objection to the Net-SNMP suite in particular, or to 3rd party 
> libraries in general?


We try to keep minimum dependencies in general so Monit can be kind of "last 
stand" on the system … nothing personal against Net-SNMP.



>> To provide support for integrating monit with other systems (like SNMP), we 
>> plan to add general framework for custom actions, so it will be possible to 
>> use plugins like sending SNMP trap, SMS gateway plugin, tex-to-speach, etc. 
>> This way the plugins will be isolated and if there will be some bug let's 
>> say in Net-SNMP, it won't make Monit vulnerable nor crash it.
>> 
> 
> This indeed makes supporting SNMP notifications unnecessary directly in Monit.
> 
> However, that's only half of the SNMP story. How are you planning to make it 
> possible to query monit about the services that it is currently monitoring 
> while using SNMP? This isn't a trap/notification based action, it's more like 
> being able to use the "monit status" command from a remote machine using SNMP 
> facilities.


Monit has XML interface suitable for integrations like this. In your case you 
can write independent SNMP subagent which will proxy Monit's XML data source -> 
SNMP.


Regards,
Martin