ESxSNMP

ESxSNMP is a system for collecting, storing, visualizing and analyzing large sets of SNMP data. It was driven by the needs of the ESnet engineering team but is likely useful to a much wider audience. ESxSNMP makes use of the Thrift lightweight RPC package for communication between system elements.

ESxSNMP uses a hybrid model for storing data. Time series data such as interface counters is stored using TSDB. TSDB is a library for storing time series data with no loss of information. TSDB optimizes the store of it's data so that data which share similar timestamps is stored nearby on the disk allowing very fast access to specific time ranges. Data such as interface description and interface type are stored in an SQL database. Storing this data in an SQL database allows us to use the full expressiveness of SQL to query this data. Since this data changes relatively infrequently the demands placed on the SQL server are fairly modest.