snmp versus /proc

[Timothy Murphy]

Les Mikesell 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.

I did think of that.
However, rrd seems generally to be used
to create a graphic presentation available on the web,
so I assume that could be viewed on other machines on the LAN.

But I don't really know what I am talking about.
What struck me was the complication of setting up snmp
(I haven't succeeded in working out how to get v3 running yet),
compared with the simplicity of just getting eg the CPU temperature
from /proc and converting it to the format required to update the rrd
with perl, or whatever.

I'm just surprised none of the examples I looked at
seemed to do anything as simple as this,
and I wondered if I was missing something.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland