snmpbulkget implementation

[kmpanilla]

rax et all,

I'm wondering as to if there's plans on implementing snmpbulkget command into the 0.8 code structure? Seems like it would save a bit of time in the event of trying to do snmpget's on all ports of a switch or router.

The only problem is the snmpversion supported by the device needs to be 2c or greater. Not sure if there's a way to check that easily, unless there'd be a checkbox to 'use snmpbulkget'..

Either way, parsing the information back from a bulkget would be much quicker then initiating 48 different snmpget's for a 24 port switch.

Comments?

--c

[robsweet]

Actually, the plan at the moment is to NOT implement the gets in Cacti at all. When you're talking about that, you really mean that you'd like snmpbulkget implemented in cmd.php. Rather than trying to develop a good poller in addition to the Cacti interface, the plan is to be able to output an XML-based poller config file that can be used with a third-party poller.

There are several reasons for this change:
1) It lets us spend more time on the UI design and development
2) It lets users use whatever poller they want rather than being bound to the one that comes w/ Cacti
3) The XML file can be easily parsed and dumped to a config file suitable to your particular poller.

As there won't be an in-house poller included with Cacti (although we'd like to include somebody else's c-based, multi-threaded, ass-kicking poller), whether or not to use snmpbulkget is a moot point in terms of Cacti development.

Thanks for the input!
Rob.

[bulek]

Your own poller using bulk commands is right approach. Right now cacti uses snmpwalk only for "SNMP Interfaces" discovery. If you would like to use snmpbulkwalk instead then you have to do two changes:

1. Change in cacti settings path to "<path_in_your_host>/snmpbulkget"

2. Add the following line at the begining of "cacti_snmp_walk" function (which you can find in include/snmp_functions.php":

$force_version = "-v 2c";

Take in mind that this works only for external snmp support (not PHP based) and that it speeds up only device configuration discovery. Speed gain is not so big because cacti makes some additional discovery tasks with snmpget which slows down entire process.

[robsweet]

Also, keep in mind that bulk gets can be faster when you're pulling several OID's but it's overkill to just get one or two. Ideally, the poller would have some configurable thresholds that it uses to decide when do to bulk gets versus individual gets.

Rob.

[DrMosh]

This would be optimal, kind of like OpenNMS does it right now, so I can create an XML block for W2K SNMP OIDs and one for NET SNMP.