Forum Discussion

Simon_Bingham's avatar
Simon_Bingham
11 years ago

get, display and report on arbitrary text from SNMP.

I know I've mentioned this before, one of engineers just visited me and asked  "is there anyway LogicMonitor can give us the software revisions in use on all the devices on a customer network" I think the answer is still no.

It seems we have a lot of the components in place, we know the the system OIDs for this data. we have an LM collector and all the customers 100s of routers added. But LM does not allow us to pull back and display arbitrary data from devices, with no interpretation. There is so much information we could potentially harvest from the products, Serial numbers, software version, product names and descriptions.

  • Steve_Francis's avatar
    Steve_Francis
    Former Employee
    11 years ago

    Yes, we are guilty as charged here. We yet make it easy to extend textual data from the devices. It is planned (but not scheduled yet.)

    But, there are two workarounds, one more kludgy than the other...

    The less kludgy one is that we may already be collecting the data (e.g. the sysinfo on network devices usually includes the software version. This is already collected, and you can run a report on this. Its visible in the system tab on the devices page.)

    The more kludgy one is that you can write a datasource, which discovers the info you want via SNMP, and uses that as the name for an instance, but doesn't actually do anything or collect anything on that instance. I can provide more details, or an example, if you want...

  • Simon_Bingham's avatar
    Simon_Bingham
    11 years ago

    Thanks for the reply Steve, The devices we are looking at today are Junipers so the sysiod does not include the software rev, I was aware of the using the name for the datasource method but it is a bit as you say its a bit cludgy, it comes with a graph of no data, and I think ( but could be wrong ) that we have to display the serial number ( or other OID ) with the host, it leads to some interesting discussions with customers like why are you suddenly trying to graph a serial number ?. Ideally it would be great to have something more flexible and have the option for this not to be displayed.

  • Simon_Lyall's avatar
    Simon_Lyall
    11 years ago

    This sounds similar to what I am after. We have a bunch of custom nagios tests on our servers. I'm hooking them in via SNMP as datasources. The nagios test will say something like:

    CRITICAL: We are seeing error 12456 in this file

    I can use a regex to spot the CRITICAL and alert on that but I really want to display the text following it in the alert.

  • mnagel's avatar
    mnagel
    Icon for Professor rankProfessor
    6 years ago

    Yes, it is much better now, but still room for improvement (isn't that always true?).  Dynamic tables do not support text variable display -- this would be super helpful to create lists of inventory items, device versions, etc.  Instead you have to use the report function, which just makes it less accessible for casual review.  Other products like SolarWinds can report changes in variables like firmware version, for which there is no option in LM short of the premium LMConfig feature, and that doesn't actually report changes unless you use an custom API script.