24.6. Monitoring Performance with Net-SNMP
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 includes the Net-SNMP software suite, which includes a flexible and extensible Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agent. This agent and its associated utilities can be used to provide performance data from a large number of systems to a variety of tools which support polling over the SNMP protocol.
This section provides information on configuring the Net-SNMP agent to securely provide performance data over the network, retrieving the data using the SNMP protocol, and extending the SNMP agent to provide custom performance metrics.
24.6.1. Installing Net-SNMP
The Net-SNMP software suite is available as a set of RPM packages in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux software distribution. Table 24.2, “Available Net-SNMP packages” summarizes each of the packages and their contents.
Package | Provides |
---|---|
net-snmp | The SNMP Agent Daemon and documentation. This package is required for exporting performance data. |
net-snmp-libs | The netsnmp library and the bundled management information bases (MIBs). This package is required for exporting performance data. |
net-snmp-utils | SNMP clients such as snmpget and snmpwalk . This package is required in order to query a system's performance data over SNMP. |
net-snmp-perl | The mib2c utility and the NetSNMP Perl module. |
net-snmp-python | An SNMP client library for Python. |
To install any of these packages, use the
yum
command in the following form:
yum
install
package
For example, to install the SNMP Agent Daemon and SNMP clients used in the rest of this section, type the following at a shell prompt:
~]# yum install net-snmp net-snmp-libs net-snmp-utils
Note that you must have superuser privileges (that is, you must be logged in as
root
) to run this command. For more information on how to install new packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, see Section 8.2.4, “Installing Packages”.