Beats: [Metricbeat] SNMP input or module

[markwalkom]

Describe the enhancement: It'd be super awesome to support hardware or systems that only have SNMP metrics exposed, or to collect information that other beats may not have access to.

Describe a specific use case for the enhancement or feature: I use Ubiquiti networking gear at home and it'd be great to point a beat at an SNMP endpoint, with a list of MIBs or a reference to a file with them(?), to collect data.

I have compiled metricbeat for some of their gera (as it's ARM based, which we don't officially support), so this seems like an alternative method to collecting host metrics.

There is at least one community beat that does something like this. And I am also aware that there is an SNMP input in Logstash.

[fearful-symmetry]

This has been a reoccurring request, and It would be super neat if we could actually do it. I also use UniFi gear in my home lab, and I've poked around their MIBs.

It seems like the most 'natural' way to do this is to have a SNMP module, and then provide different metricsets for MIB ranges, i.e, a metricset for iso(1).org(3).dod(6).internet(1).mgmt(2).mib-2(1).ip(4) one for .iso(1).org(3).dod(6).internet(1).mgmt(2).mib-2(1).interfaces(2), one for the special UniFi MIBs, etc. This would actually be great fodder for the new "lightweight" modules that we're exploring, since most of the code would be module level, with individual metricsets mostly being configs for the various MIBs.

[enotspe]

I would add to the request other types of remote metric monitoring

Streaming Telemetry
WMI
SSH

[loganmc10]

Yes this would be really nice. Right now I do this using Prometheus+snmp_exporter. I then send it to metricbeat using remote_write (metricbeat is a "sidecar" docker container).

However it's a bit of a pain to graph the metrics in Kibana (I'm still trying to figure this part out). It would be nice if it was a little more integrated by default into Kibana the way that regular host metrics are currently.

[enotspe]

Altough I totally love logstash, I have ended up using Zabbix + Elastic, snmp input plugin is just too basic.

You kind of get the best of both worlds: NMS functions + super custom dashboards with Kibana and Canvas.