On 2012-04-19 05:08, GOLLSCHEWSKY, Tim wrote:
Hi Adam,
We hope it should be faster, but we're mostly doing this to make it easier. Injecting things into SNMP is a pain. We also gain the ability to "detect" applications at poller time with no additional work, as we now do with ports and some other things.
This sounds great.
Is the intention also that the unix agent will one day capture all the metrics we currently capture with SNMP? So one day "snmpd" can be turned off?
Or will the agent work in tandem with the SNMP poller?
I don't think we will replace any of the 'standard' things which are already very well supported with SNMP. Certainly we would never replace network statistics, as that would require duplicating far too much code.
The intention is to use the Agent to obtain information that we would otherwise have to hack into Net-SNMP via extend scripts, and to perhaps provide extra information for modules which also poll via SNMP.
I don't think the experience of using the existing 'applications' system with SNMP injection scripts was terribly good. It is a pain to set up, a pain to test and a pain to autodetect.
Currently we can do the following from the Agent:
RPM Packages (new) Apache statistics (replacing the old SNMP injection) MySQL statistics (replacing the old SNMP injection) NGINX statistics (replacing the old SNMP injection)
Basically: Anyone who is currently using Observium but who hasn't use the "applications" framework will see no difference if they don't install the agent. Anyone who is currently using the "applications" framework will have to migrate all of their applications to the agent.
Anyone who doesn't install the agent in the future will miss out on future improvements to the Linux support in particular, as there are a lot of things we can fetch via the agent that we can't get easily via SNMP.
adam.