Summary

In this chapter, we explored ways to perform network monitoring via SNMP. We configured SNMP-related commands on network devices and used our network management VM with an SNMP poller to query the devices. We used the PySNMP module to simplify and automate our SNMP queries. We also learned how to save the query results in a flat file or database to be used for future examples.

Later in this chapter, we used two different Python visualization packages, Matplotlib and Pygal, to graph SNMP results. Each package has its distinct advantages. Matplotlib is a mature, feature-rich library that is widely used in data science projects. Pygal can natively generate SVG format graphs that are flexible and web-friendly. We saw how we can generate line and pie graphs that are relevant for network monitoring.

Toward the end of this chapter, we looked at an all-inclusive network monitoring tool named Cacti. It primarily uses SNMP for network monitoring, but we saw how we...