Summary: SNMP tools

Thanks to the few people who responded;

Alan Orndorff
Kevin Buterbaugh
Matt Morris

Kevin suggested Sun Remote Services. We were wanting to keep this in-house,
and be able to generate reports as needed, so we are reluctant to farm it
out. It is also hoped that, should the solution be functional, that this may
become a long-term service. The other problem with farming it out is that
limits our ability to tie in to Tivoli (if we can at all).

Matt suggested OpenNMS, but according to their website, they only support
Solaris 8 on Intel. We only have Sun servers, and some (the most important
in the short term) are still running Solaris 2.6.

Alan has the best suggestion, which is to run Symon using the existing
agents. Assuming we can still get/find a copy of Symon, we may go this way.
Our worry is that SMC has replaced Symon, so the old "stock" agents will
(probably?) go away. We were wanting to go with one solution and stick with
it. The good news is that, according to Sun's website, SMC will work with
the old Symon agents. That's probably the route we'll explore first, as it
means not having to wait for the DBAs to fully explore how the replacement
of an agent they don't use will affect them.

I had hoped to hear from people that had experience with both SMC and
net-SNMP (the new name for ucd-SNMP), as those were our two main runners,
but it seems that using SNMP to gather stats on/monitor systems isn't that
big a deal to people. Shame, as we are hoping to be able to gather the
information centrally and not only monitor each system, but compare them
easily. I guess we'll just have to experiment with the two packages.

Rainer Heilke

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Heilke, Rainer 
> Sent:	Friday, October 26, 2001 9:56 AM
> To:	'sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org'
> Subject:	SNMP tools
> 
> Greetings, all.
> 
> For the last while, we have been looking at implementing some monitoring
> on
> our Sun servers using SNMP, and we have a few questions before we start
> implementing, having looked through a selective pile of documentation
> already.
> 
> 1) Are there any good/bad comments you have regarding Sun Management
> Center,
> net-SNMP, or other? Which would you go with?
> 
> 2) It seems that the stock SNMP agents for Solaris (snmpdx, snmpXdmid) are
> so non-standard that neither of the above (nor NetHealth) can use them,
> and
> require replacement. Are there any moves at Sun that people have heard of
> to
> move toward other default SNMP agents for future OS releases, say those
> for
> SMC? Or, alternatively, what monitoring tools can work with these agents
> to
> provide the standard information people expect from these tools?
> 
> Any information would be gratefully received. We would rather not spend
> weeks chasing down dead ends.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Rainer Heilke
> ATCO I-Tek
> Phone: 780-420-7806
> Fax: 780-420-3939
> rainer.heilke@atcoitek.com
> 
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