How do I get ZXTM system information through SNMP?

ZXTM exports information about running services through SNMP and you can find the MIB containing details of the information in the ZXTM Administration Interface.

ZXTM Appliances also automatically export lots of standard information about the running system, such as traffic through the network cards, memory usage and CPU usage. It is not possible to obtain this information through a standard ZXTM software installation, however it is very easy to configure your system to provide the information:

1. Install net-snmp onto the ZXTM machine. Usually your OS will provide pre-packaged versions of net-snmp which you can install using your standard software installation procedure.
2. Go to the ZXTM Administration Interface and change the SNMP settings as follows:
   • snmp!enabled -> Yes
   • snmp!bindip -> 127.0.0.1
   • snmp!allow -> localhost
   • snmp!port -> 1161
   • snmp!community -> private
3. Edit the net-snmp configuration file (often /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf) and add the following to the end of the file (you might instead be able to add it to snmpd.local.conf):

   # Proxy ZXTM oids to the ZXTM server
   proxy -v 1 -c private localhost:1161 .1.3.6.1.4.1.7146
   

4. Restart the snmp server.

You should now be able to see both system and ZXTM oids through the SNMP server running on the standard port (161). If you can only see a limited subset of the system OIDS (and none of the ZXTM ones) ensure that the access control in the snmpd.conf file is not too restrictive.

You can test SNMP using the snmpwalk command:

$ snmpwalk -v1 -c public localhost 1.3
SNMPv2-MIB::sysDescr.0 = STRING: Linux hostname 2.6.17 #2 SMP Fri Oct 13 18:45:35 UTC 2006 i686
SNMPv2-MIB::sysObjectID.0 = OID: NET-SNMP-MIB::netSnmpAgentOIDs.10
.....

Crispin Flowerday [Zeus Dev Team] 12 December 2006