implement better data serialization for active discovery results

A few months ago after being told that SNMP_Network_Interfaces was the new preferred method for network interface data collection (despite it excluding SVI interfaces and using weird backward naming for the property to include all interfaces -- interface.filtering = true), we moved ahead with implementation.  We found soon after that the module was corrupting interface descriptions, and a ticket raised with support resulted in the “too bad, sucks to be you” sort of response I often receive.

The corruption involves stripping all hash signs from interface descriptions.  This may sound harmless, but we have for years told our clients to prepend a # to an interface description to exclude it from alerting, which our automation detects and handles. 

The reason this happens is because the folks who came up with LM thought it would be a cool idea to use # as a field separator and this was embraced and extended by later developers.  There was a solution we recommended (that was rejected) -- specify a transform string so the # becomes something else known we can match without breaking monitoring for thousands of interfaces.

My request here is to work out a method to transition from the current field separator mechanism to an actual data serialization method like JSON.