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kjkoster
27-07-2008, 09:19
Dear All,

What is monitoring without SNMP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNMP)? I have to admit that I do not use SNMP myself. It's still on my should-really-look-at-as-soon-as-I-have-time list. Of course, that does not mean others have to make the same mistake.

There is some terse documentation (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/management/SNMP.html) on the Sun Java management page (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/management/) for people who want to check out SNMP. To me, the Sun documentation articles are a lot like the UNIX manual pages: they are only useful once you know what you are doing. To learn something new, you have to look elsewhere.

On the Zabbix forums I found a condensed JBoss SNMP howto (http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showpost.php?p=35083), posted by one of their members named areplogle (http://www.zabbix.com/forum/member.php?u=5890).

On Sun's blog site, check out the blog by Daniel Fuchs (http://blogs.sun.com/jmxetc/). He writes a lot of insightful information about JMX and SNMP based monitoring of Java applications. For example, here is a blog post comparing JMX and SNMP (http://blogs.sun.com/jmxetc/entry/jmx_vs_snmp) (sneaky peek: Daniel recommends using JMX over SNMP :D).

Kees Jan

Barry
13-08-2008, 12:13
Actually while I was still working on my degree I worked at a company that let me create a "gateway" that would map our internal proprietary management protocols to SNMP so I'm familiar with how SNMP works and what it provides.
Mostly SNMP is usefull in shops where several kinds of systems need to be monitored.
SNMP is supported on all sorts of devices, ranging from switches, printers to mainframes and applications running on systems.

JMX only allows you to manage the Java side of the equasion.
Of course lots has changed in the world and even the standard implementation of JMX included inside the JVM comes with SNMP support as well.