SNMP can be used by Nagios in various ways. As the protocol is widely supported by operating systems and network devices, it is a great choice for monitoring a wide variety of machines. SNMP features a standardized way to describe typical parameters that describe a device-hardware, network connectivity, applications and services, and much more. This makes accessing this information from Nagios very easy. SNMP is enabled by default on many operating systems and most network devices, which makes it very easy to monitor such devices in Nagios.
In this chapter, we have learned the following:
- What is SNMP, how versions SNMPv1, SNMPv2c, and SNMPv3 differ
- What are OIDs as well as MIB
- Visualizing SNMP data using GUI tools
- Querying SNMP information within Nagios
- Receiving SNMP traps from other devices on the network
- Additional Nagios plugins that can be used to query data over SNMP
The next chapter will talk about monitoring Microsoft Windows machines using NSClient++. It will also describe setting up multiple Nagios instances and distributed monitoring.