snmp versus /proc

[Timothy Murphy]

Alexander Dalloz 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 ?

> Programming with SNMP you get a wider range of network device's
> information than just by systems having a /proc partition (like Linux;
> on BSD /proc often isn't even mounted for security reasons).

I can well believe that;
SNMP seems to display an infinite number of variables.

However, all the examples I've seen
are actually looking at variables available from /proc or iptables,
and it just struck me that the additional complication of setting up snmp
made the whole rrd thing absurdly complicated
(ie I haven't succeeded in getting it working!)

It just struck me that snmp + rrd might be something
that administrators of large systems had got into the habit of using,
which might actually not make sense any longer.

But as I said, I don't really know what I am talking about ...

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