snmp versus /proc

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 16:37, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I've been looking (not very hard) at RRD (round-robin database),
> and I notice that several examples displaying things like memory usage
> use snmp (more precisely snmpwalk) to gather the information.
> 
> I'm just wondering if this still makes sense.
> Most of the information seems to be available in /proc ,
> and I wondered if it is just conservatism
> that leads people to keep on with snmp ?

Monitoring systems often monitor many servers running
different OS's and other devices like routers and switches.
Snmp values are available over the network with fast udp
requests.  /proc is only available  on the local host and
only on Linux and similar OS's.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com