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SNMP Gateway Service

SNMP is still a widely used protocol, to monitor distributed systems and devices across a variety of hardware and software platforms. Ceph’s SNMP integration focuses on forwarding alerts from it’s Prometheus Alertmanager cluster to a gateway daemon. The gateway daemon, transforms the alert into an SNMP Notification and sends it on to a designated SNMP management platform. The gateway daemon is from the snmp_notifier project, which provides SNMP V2c and V3 support (authentication and encryption).

Ceph’s SNMP gateway service deploys one instance of the gateway by default. You may increase this by providing placement information. However, bear in mind that if you enable multiple SNMP gateway daemons, your SNMP management platform will receive multiple notifications for the same event.

Compatibility

The table below shows the SNMP versions that are supported by the gateway implementation

SNMP Version	Supported	Notes
V1	❌	Not supported by snmp_notifier
V2c	✔
V3 authNoPriv	✔	uses username/password authentication, without encryption (NoPriv = no privacy)
V3 authPriv	✔	uses username/password authentication with encryption to the SNMP management platform

Deploying an SNMP Gateway

Both SNMP V2c and V3 provide credentials support. In the case of V2c, this is just the community string - but for V3 environments you must provide additional authentication information. These credentials are not supported on the command line when deploying the service. Instead, you must create the service using a credentials file (in yaml format), or specify the complete service definition in a yaml file.

Command format

ceph orch apply snmp-gateway <snmp_version:V2c|V3> <destination> [<port:int>] [<engine_id>] [<auth_protocol: MD5|SHA>] [<privacy_protocol:DES|AES>] [<placement>] ...

Usage Notes

you must supply the --snmp-version parameter
the --destination parameter must be of the format hostname:port (no default)
you may omit --port. It defaults to 9464
the --engine-id is a unique identifier for the device (in hex) and required for SNMP v3 only. Suggested value: 8000C53F<fsid> where the fsid is from your cluster, without the ‘-’ symbols
for SNMP V3, the --auth-protocol setting defaults to SHA
for SNMP V3, with encryption you must define the --privacy-protocol
you must provide a -i <filename> to pass the secrets/passwords to the orchestrator

Deployment Examples

SNMP V2c

Here’s an example for V2c, showing CLI and service based deployments

ceph orch apply snmp-gateway --port 9464 --snmp_version=V2c --destination=192.168.122.73:162 -i ./snmp_creds.yaml

with a credentials file that contains;

---
snmp_community: public

Alternatively, you can create a yaml definition for the gateway and apply it from a single file

ceph orch apply -i snmp-gateway.yml

with the file containing the following configuration

service_type: snmp-gateway
service_name: snmp-gateway
placement:
  count: 1
spec:
  credentials:
    snmp_community: public
  port: 9464
  snmp_destination: 192.168.122.73:162
  snmp_version: V2c

SNMP V3 (authNoPriv)

Deploying an snmp-gateway service supporting SNMP V3 with authentication only, would look like this;

ceph orch apply snmp-gateway --snmp-version=V3 --engine-id=800C53F000000 --destination=192.168.122.1:162 -i ./snmpv3_creds.yml

with a credentials file as;

---
snmp_v3_auth_username: myuser
snmp_v3_auth_password: mypassword

or as a service configuration file

service_type: snmp-gateway
service_name: snmp-gateway
placement:
  count: 1
spec:
  credentials:
    snmp_v3_auth_password: mypassword
    snmp_v3_auth_username: myuser
  engine_id: 800C53F000000
  port: 9464
  snmp_destination: 192.168.122.1:162
  snmp_version: V3

SNMP V3 (authPriv)

Defining an SNMP V3 gateway service that implements authentication and privacy (encryption), requires two additional values

ceph orch apply snmp-gateway --snmp-version=V3 --engine-id=800C53F000000 --destination=192.168.122.1:162 --privacy-protocol=AES -i ./snmpv3_creds.yml

with a credentials file as;

---
snmp_v3_auth_username: myuser
snmp_v3_auth_password: mypassword
snmp_v3_priv_password: mysecret

Note

The credentials are stored on the host, restricted to the root user and passed to the snmp_notifier daemon as an environment file (--env-file), to limit exposure.

AlertManager Integration

When an SNMP gateway service is deployed or updated, the Prometheus Alertmanager configuration is automatically updated to forward any alert that has an OID label to the SNMP gateway daemon for processing.

Implementing the MIB

To make sense of the SNMP Notification/Trap, you’ll need to apply the MIB to your SNMP management platform. The MIB (CEPH-MIB.txt) can downloaded from the main Ceph repo