2

We use Cacti to monitor trends on our servers.

Sometimes I get a new appliance or a server, and that appliance comes with a MIB which can be used to monitor the appliance via SNMP. For this example, I have Google Mini Search Appliance, and Google provides a couple of MIBs which can be queried via SNMP. However, this question often comes up for many new appliances and new servers.

If I want to monitor this Google Mini via Cacti, I need to create a Cacti template, which is a non-trivial task. Let's pretend that the Google Search Appliance Statistics template doesn't already exist.

Are there any tools which will auto-generate a Cacti Template from an existing MIB? Or are there any tools which can help me to generate a Cacti Template from an existing MIB?

1
  • 1
    That would be a very handy tool.
    – womble
    Jul 19, 2011 at 23:39

2 Answers 2

1

What you need is usually called a MIB Compiler within the SNMP industry. However, they're not really compilers; they're translators. I don't believe there is a Cacti MIB compiler, but it wouldn't be too hard to create a translator of your own.

A useful tool that I highly recommend, is the libsmi suite which contains a program called smidump. smidump outputs in various formats. You'll probably want to run something like smidump -f identifiers <mibfile> which will dump a sanitized MIB into something more human readable. From the looks of this page, your Cacti syntax is XML. So, I don't think it would take too much to take the smidump, run it through a Perl script to produce your desired Cacti XML. You can then edit through the XML file and produce more human-readable descriptions if needed. Explore the smidump -f to see if there is a format closer to your needs. I see an XML format that might work.

0

The problem is that there is a standard 'well defined' set of SNMP OIDs for certain things (routers, mostly, and interfaces, traffic, etc). However, once you move outside those well defined things, then each vendor has its own MIB structure... and unless you want all the OIDs, then you have to choose which ones you want, at which point there is no template.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .