Installation

Network Device Monitoring relies on the SNMP Integration included in the Datadog Agent package. Ensure you are using Agent v7.32+. No additional installation is necessary.

Configuration

Datadog Network Device Monitoring supports collecting metrics from individual devices, or auto-discovering devices (unique IP addresses) on entire subnets.

Choose your collection strategy based on the number of devices present on your network, and how dynamic your network is (meaning frequency of adding or removing devices):

• For small and mostly static networks, see Monitoring individual devices.
• For larger or dynamic networks, see Autodiscovery.

Regardless of the collection strategy, leverage Datadog’s sysObjectID mapped device profiles to automatically collect relevant metrics from your devices.

Monitoring individual devices

To monitor individual devices:

• Include the IP address and any additional devices metadata (as tags) in the snmp.d/conf.yaml file in the conf.d/ folder at the root of your Agent’s configuration directory. See the sample snmp.d/conf.yaml for all available configuration options.

• Restart the Agent.

After setup, the Agent collects relevant metrics by matching your devices to one of Datadog’s device profiles.

To expand your setup:

• Add more instances to collect metrics from more devices on your network.
• Use Autodiscovery if you need to collect metrics from lots of devices across a dynamic network.

Autodiscovery

An alternative to specifying individual devices is to use Autodiscovery to automatically discover all the devices on your network.

Autodiscovery polls each IP on the configured subnet, and checks for a response from the device. Then, the Datadog Agent looks up the sysObjectID of the discovered device and maps it to one of Datadog’s device profiles. The profiles contain lists of predefined metrics to collect for various types of devices.

To use Autodiscovery with Network Device Monitoring:

1. Install or upgrade the Datadog Agent to v7.27+. For platform specific instructions, see the Datadog Agent documentation.

2. Edit the datadog.yaml Agent configuration file to include all the subnets for Datadog to scan. The following sample config provides required parameters, default values, and examples for Autodiscovery.

listeners:
  - name: snmp
snmp_listener:
  workers: 100  # number of workers used to discover devices concurrently
  discovery_interval: 3600  # interval between each autodiscovery in seconds
  loader: core  # use core check implementation of SNMP integration. recommended
  use_device_id_as_hostname: true  # recommended
  configs:
    - network_address: 10.10.0.0/24  # CIDR subnet
      loader: core
      snmp_version: 2
      port: 161
      community_string: '***'  # enclose with single quote
      tags:
      - "key1:val1"
      - "key2:val2"
    - network_address: 10.20.0.0/24
      loader: core
      snmp_version: 2
      port: 161
      community_string: '***'
      tags:
      - "key1:val1"
      - "key2:val2"

listeners:
  - name: snmp
snmp_listener:
  workers: 100  # number of workers used to discover devices concurrently
  discovery_interval: 3600  # interval between each autodiscovery in seconds
  loader: core  # use core check implementation of SNMP integration. recommended
  use_device_id_as_hostname: true  # recommended
  configs:
    - network_address: 10.10.0.0/24  # CIDR subnet
      snmp_version: 3
      user: 'user'
      authProtocol: 'SHA256'  # choices: MD5, SHA, SHA224, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512
      authKey: 'fakeKey'  # enclose with single quote
      privProtocol: 'AES256'  # choices: DES, AES, AES192, AES192C, AES256, AES256C
      privKey: 'fakePrivKey'  # enclose with single quote
      tags:
        - 'key1:val1'
        - 'key2:val2'
    - network_address: 10.20.0.0/24
      snmp_version: 3
      user: 'user'
      authProtocol: 'SHA256'
      authKey: 'fakeKey'
      privProtocol: 'AES256'
      privKey: 'fakePrivKey'
      tags:
        - 'key1:val1'
        - 'key2:val2'

Note: The Datadog Agent automatically configures the SNMP check with each of the IPs that are discovered. A discovered device is an IP that responds successfully when being polled using SNMP.

Ping

When configured, the SNMP check can also send ICMP pings to your devices. This can be configured for individual as well as Autodiscovered devices.

To set up ping with Network Device Monitoring:

1. Install or upgrade the Datadog Agent to v7.52+. For platform specific instructions, see the Datadog Agent documentation.

2. Edit the snmp.d/conf.yaml file in the conf.d/ folder at the root of your Agent’s configuration directory for individual devices or the datadog.yaml Agent configuration file for Autodiscovery. See the sample snmp.d/conf.yaml for all available configuration options.

3. Linux Only: If you’re receiving errors when running ping, you may need to configure the integration to send pings using a raw socket. This requires elevated privileges and is done using the Agent’s system-probe. See the linux.use_raw_socket Agent configuration and system-probe configuration below.

Note: For Autodiscovery, Datadog does not ping devices that do not respond to SNMP.

Use raw sockets (Linux only)

If you’re on Linux and want to use raw sockets for ping, you must also enable ping in the system-probe configuration file in addition to the Agent configuration above.

Edit /etc/datadog-agent/system-probe.yaml to set the enable flag to true.

ping:
  enabled: true

Validation

Run the Agent’s status subcommand and look for snmp under the Checks section.

Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Using Profiles with Network Device MonitoringDOCUMENTATION SNMP Monitoring OverviewKNOWLEDGE CENTER Monitor SNMP with DatadogBLOG