SNMP - monitoring large number of devices

Tue Sep 29 21:39:16 UTC 2015

Pavel,

It's all going to be how you deploy a selected polling system. Most server operating systems are going to struggle with that many transactions in a short period of time no matter the awesomeness of the polling engine. Look for a distributed polling solution. If you can spread the connection load out a bit it may be less of an issue. The worst issue will be populating your solution with that many devices and sensors to go check, look for api or import tool! What do you think the network latency between your polling location or locations to all of the cable modems? Do they respond pretty well with SNMP queries? 

We use PRTG and its very efficient with SNMP. One of the most efficient SNMP polling engines I have used. My quick math and experience tells me that with a PRTG core server and two or three remote PRTG probes (hardware based) you should be able to hit 6,000 snmp polls a min from each probe. PRTG will automatically attempt a multi get. Go with three probes to be safe and I think you could hit over 50,000 with buffer room. 

Easy platform, inexpensive compared to other licensed NMS systems. Free trial with unlimited sensors on their website. But their software engineering staff will state that this project would be stretching the design of the system and its focus. 

Would love to hear what you figure out works best!

Sincerely,
Nick Ellermann – CTO & VP Cloud Services
BroadAspect

E: nellermann at broadaspect.com 
P: 703-297-4639
F: 703-996-4443

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-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces+nellermann=broadaspect.com at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Pavel Dimow
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2015 4:20 PM
To: NANOG <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: SNMP - monitoring large number of devices

Hi all,

recently I have been tasked with a NMS project. The idea is to pool about
20 OID's from 50k cable modems in less then 5 minutes (yes, I know it's a one million OID's). Before you say check out some very professional and expensive solutions I would like to know are there any alternatives like open source "snmp framework"? To be more descriptive many of you knows how big is the mess with snmp on cable modem. You always first perform snmp walk in order to discover interfaces and then read the values for those interfaces. As cable modem can bundle more DS channels, one time you can have one and other time you can have N+1 DS channels = interfaces. All in all I don't believe that there is something perfect out there when it comes to tracking huge number of cable modems so I would like to know is there any "snmp framework" that can be exteded and how did you (or would you) solve this problem.

Thank you.