Zpoller is a new architecture SNMP poller in the RTG tradition. It has the following distinguishing features:
- User friendly configuration. There is no need to reload or restart for configuration and "target making" happens in the background as required.
- Very high performance. A typical installation on a medium sized VM (1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM) can poll around 10.000 counters per second.
- Light system resource usage. Threadless design reduces memory needs to the minimum necessary, around 60 MB is normal for a setup with 500 hosts and a few polling packages.
- No precision degradation. Unless you specifically tell it otherwise, zpoller will keep data at full precision forever.
- A 64-bit Unix like OS. Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X are tested platforms.
- Node.js version 0.6 or higher.
- MongoDB for data storage. Smaller installations can run the DB on the same host as the poller. This is where you need the 64-bitness mentioned above.
- Install (MongoDB)[http://www.mongodb.org/downloads] somewhere suitable. If you have no dedicated database host, a default installation on the host that will run zpoller is fine.
- Install the latest version of (Node.js)[http://nodejs.org/#download]. The easiest is usually to install it from source since distribution packages are often out of date. You will need a C++ compiler installed.
- Install zpoller by running sudo npm install -g zpoller.
Configuration consists of three files in the conf directory.
- general.yml contains general configuration settings; for example how to reach the database.
- packages.yml (not to be confused with package.json in the root directory) contains definitions of "polling packages", i.e. which variables to poll in which intervals and so on.
- hosts.csv is a list of hosts and their SNMP communities. This is deliberately not an YML file in order to make it easier to autogenerate from whatever canonical source of host information you might have.
The configuration file samples are well documented and should be self-explanatory.
When any of these files are changed, or when zpoller is set up for the first time, they must be imported with the zconfig utility. Whenever zconfig is run, it reads the configuration files on disk and updates the configuration stored in the database.
zconfig performs some amount of validation in an attempt to ensure that the configuration is valid before committing it to the database.
Once the configuration has been imported, it will be picked up by the poller at the next polling run. If you have added new hosts or polling packages, target making will happen as needed.
2-Clause BSD