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ezSNMPd extension for eZ publish
================================

The goal of the ezSNMPd extension is to provide a unified API for monitoring
installations of the eZ Publish cms - both availability monitoring and
performance monitoring are target use cases.

This means exposing a set of values that can be queried, such as e.g. the status
of the datadabase (can connect to or not), the number of content objects and so
on...

The protocols that can be used to query these values are, in order of preference:
1 - via the SNMP protocol, using an appropriate 3rd party tool
2 - via command line, invoking a php script
3 - via the web, using a plain http GET request

The main advantages of using snmp instead of http for querying values are:
- snmp is a standard monitoring protocol, understood by every monitoring tool
  in the market, such as nagios, zenoss, hyperic etc...
- the values can be queried even when the webserver is down / unreachable
- some values can be queried even when the database is down / unreachable
- access to snmp can be secured independently of access to the web interfaces

The main advantages of using a php script instead of http for querying values are:
- the values can be queried even when the webserver is down / unreachable
- some values can be queried even when the database is down / unreachable

The set of values that can be queried is incomplete in this release of the extension,
but an extensibility mechanism via "handler" classes is provided, so that other
extensions can hook into the system to provide new values to be queried.

For the current release there is no support for active event notification, i.e.
snmp trap signals.

You can read more about snmp at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snmp

Requirements
============

o  eZ Publish version:

   Make sure you have eZ Publish version 4.0 or higher

o  SNMP Agent:

   An external snmp agent is needed to handle reception of snmp requests.
   The net-snmp service, available for linux and windows (http://www.net-snmp.org),
   provides the extensible agent that is compatible with the ezsnmp extension.
   Other agents that support the same extensibility 'pass_persist' API might work,
   too, but they have not been tested.

   NB: without an snmp-agent, the extension can still be used but monitoring will
   have to be done via http calls or direct execution of command-line php scripts.


Developer References
====================

- adding scripts to net-snmp agent

http://www.nagiosexchange.org/cgi-bin/page.cgi?g=Detailed%2F2855.html;d=1
http://dreness.com/wikimedia/index.php?title=Net_SNMP
http://www.net-snmp.org/docs/man/snmpd.conf.html

- smi information (for building MIBs)

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2578
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2579
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2580