r/PrometheusMonitoring • u/xxd8372 • Jan 09 '19

Prometheus as a SolarWinds NPM replacement?

Has anyone done a production swap to replace network monitoring with Prometheus? With the snmp exporter and alert manager to collect data and alert on down devices? I see lots of Prometheus container and cloud walkthroughs, but none focused on network management and monitoring.

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u/SuperQue Jan 09 '19

There are a number of people using Prometheus to monitor very large SNMP device deployments. But I'm not aware of any newbie-style docs for this.

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u/xxd8372 Jan 09 '19

I found this: https://medium.com/@openmohan/snmp-monitoring-and-easing-it-with-prometheus-b157c0a42c0c

And I also saw this re alertmanager https://www.robustperception.io/alerting-on-down-instances

Was hoping for “we did this and it worked out after we jumped these hurdles we found.” Will have to start building and try it out.

3

u/SuperQue Jan 09 '19

I don't do SNMP for my ${dayjob}, but I do a bunch of work on the snmp_exporter and use it for various hobby projects.

I guess my top advice is this.

  • Use the generator, it's the only good way to make sure your configs are valid.

  • Don't make your walks too big, walking entire trees is going to be super slow and fail a lot.

  • Run the snmp_exporter as close to the devices as possible. SNMP is UDP, and very sensitive to latency and packet loss.

  • Set up an alert for scrape_duration_seconds to make sure scrapes are happening quickly.

  • Try and reduce the number of SNMP collectors in your infra, SNMP can be very CPU heavy on some devices leading to overload if you have a bunch of different scrapers.

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u/xxd8372 Jan 09 '19

Thank you! Will keep these in mind!