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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.

Table 24.2. Available Net-SNMP packages

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”.