Nagios Support Forum

Hey man, I'm just another customer, offering some advice.

Mahalo, right?

If you are planning on doing active SNMP polls we will need to tackle this from a different angle. Can you post a link to the MIB for that device? That way we can look it over and help find the OIDs you might be interested in. The names aren't always intuitive, so another few sets of eyes might help find something relevant. It is entirely possible, however, that the information you seek is only available as a trap.

I found a few posts on various sites that seem to be related:

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1115088
http://forums.apc.com/thread/3491?start=0&tstart=0

They both reference some specific OIDs but the topics are also somewhat outdated. If you can poll those OIDs and they return valid data, you're really close to getting this working.

Otherwise if you have documentation or a setup guide, they are usually pretty good at giving examples of usage and important OIDs.

toleolu wrote:I've got a request sitting on my desk to renew our support contract at a cost of around $4,500.00. I don't appreciate being told to go read a freakin book when I'm spending that kind of money for support. Additionally, I've got a ton of other things I need to do around here besides play with Nagios.

Exactly what the hell are we paying for here? Quicker response to posts on forum?

vAJ is in no way affiliated with Nagios Enterprises, and his posts are his own and are not representative of our support team.

That said, there really is a *huge* difference between traps and regular SNMP queries, both in setup and overall logistics. Getting a MIB browser is a great way to view exactly what traps a device can send, since an snmpwalk will not reveal this information. And if you do decide to go with active SNMP queries, the OIDs will be listed and searchable, to make configuring queries much easier. We certainly would not tell someone to simply go buy a book, but we have a whole shelf here of books that we reference and I can't help but agree that a SNMP reference manual might help not just in this situation, but in the future as well.

The $4500 figure you reference is not just faster forum support - it includes the software license itself (which is most of the cost), email support, remote sessions, access to customer-only downloads like wizards and components, and the future renewal discount. I should also say our support has been fairly quick, considering this thread started yesterday a few hours before closing time and our replies have come in usually within 10 minutes of your posts. vAJ was very helpful with his responses so we only stepped in when we thought of something he did not. If you feel the support is not sufficient on the forums you are welcome and encouraged to open an email ticket by sending your request in to [email protected], and if needed we can set up a remote session from there.

vAJ, my comments weren't directed at you, it was miltchev's comment that I felt was totally out of line and uncalled for from a vendor.

As for the rest of the Nagios support staff, you guys need to understand that we don't have the time or the resources for our IT staff to become "experts" on all the systems we have to support. That's why we pay for service contracts, so we can rely on the expertise of our vendors to resolve issues. All we have to do with our other vendors is call them up, they remote in, fix whatever needs fixing, and we're done. Time to move on to the next problem.

With Nagios, since we only get 10 remote sessions a year, we've been reluctant to use them for fear of using them all and then not having any when something major occurs. So, as a result, I spend DAYS going back and forth on forum posts getting things to work. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the help and overall you guys have been great, but I'm no expert on this stuff and what's more, I don't want to be. I just don't have the time for it. I have too many other things I have to take care of.

As far as this SNMP trap stuff goes, the Netbotz gear can generate emails out of the box. All we have to do is specify some SMTP settings and some email addresses and we're done. We could have set that up in a few minutes, but we had hoped we could do this through Nagios. But if it's going to end up being a matter of us spending days going back and forth on forum posts and dealing with snarky little comments from our vendor, then maybe we should stop spending money on systems that require more expertise than we're capable of and spend it where it's really needed, patient care.

PM sent.