Configuring SNMP

So far in this chapter, we have looked at the GUI to get information on faults and events. These do, however, require someone to be watching and actively looking for them. We should be a little more proactive and have such details sent to a centralized monitoring platform. We will start by configuring Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), which when combined with a suitable Network Management Station (NMS), such as Zabbix or Nagios, will allow us to receive alerts by e-mail, SMS, or any other number of methods.

Note

Try to keep the community string simple. Originally, I used the community string ACI-Community. After many hours trying to troubleshoot the lack of SNMP output, I asked on the Cisco support forums and Tomas De Leon suggested changing it. Once I set it to cisco123, everything started to work. 

Getting ready

We do need a couple of things set up before SNMP will workL

• An out-of-band contract in the mgmt tenancy, permitting SNMP traffic (UDP/161). This should already...