Using snmp through the layers

For some time I've been working on a project where we need to improve monitoring of our web application. Recently that opportunity has been realised and I've been working with a few people to implement some of the patterns i discussed in System Management Patters.

SNMP is a natural fit for publishing application statistics. The thing I don't like about existing snmp agent implementations is that they are all pretty language dependent and they are built on the old style, define a mib, crank a wheel to generate a template, then you finally get to add code for you metrics.

So firstly work has been done to have an agent publish statistics based on results from an xml stream. This has been built on top of pysnmp.

This allows us to have an agent on each device/box that can publish stats, regardless of language as long as you instrument the device in question (and you have a python 2.4 environment).

Once your stats are published, you will need a manager to gather them.
While any SNMP manager can be used, often like with jffnms, you will need to write your own poller anyway. We've created an easily configurable pollers so a manager, can poll and update rrdtool database.

While some of the leg work is alleviated, you will still need to do the following: instrument your app, define your rrd datasources and optionally design your mib.

I'm currently looking at opensourcing this very shortly.

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