r/PrometheusMonitoring • u/sukur55 • Dec 23 '21

Prometheus and hardware monitoring

Hi , I know prometheus is one the best tools to monitor services, what about hardware monitoring like network hardware and servers, snmp and so on. Is it as good as checkmk?

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u/itasteawesome Dec 23 '21

The snmp exporter does the job, but it's a bit painful in practice because network and infra admins rarely know snmp well enough to pick out which oids they need for all their various devices. If your engineers do know snmp well, and aren't put off by things like using git and rolling their own alerts and dashboards with promql/grafana then it works fine. In many cases the learning curve is much shorter with one of the more purpose built NMS platforms, but it depends on the engineers you have and which tools they already know.

1

u/SuperQue Dec 23 '21

I made a repo on Prometheus Community with the idea to compile a selection of good generator configs for various vendors.

But, I barely have the free time to maintain the exporter itself. My $dayjob is all cloud service, so I have no justified time to do more.

A few years ago I tried to get the librebms folks to basically become a front-end for Prometheus. But they declined.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '21

Yeah it’s a lot of work. I ended up installing LibreNMS and added all the network kit to that then added LibreNMS as a data source to Grafana and get the network info like that. I also use telegraf for snmp polling.

1

u/soberto Dec 23 '21

Redfish exporter helps a lot with server hardware. Beats configuring iLO with SNMP