Adding Devices

Devices can be added to Observium either via a CLI script or via the web interface. We generally recommend adding and removing devices via the CLI scripts, since your web server generally shouldn't have read/write access to your Observium rrd storage and may be prevented from running things like fping due to permissions.

Device Requirements

In order to add a device to Observium it must be running a correctly configured SNMP agent and be both pingable and SNMP accessible from the Observium server.

Adding from the CLI

Adding devices from the CLI is performed via the add_device.php script in your Observium installation's root directory.

The script supports three modes of operation, firstly, adding a standard SNMP v1 or v2c device with a community string:

./add_device.php <hostname> [community] [v1|v2c] [port] [udp|udp6|tcp|tcp6]

Adding an SNMP v3 capable device with a selection of different encryption and authentication schemes to chose from:

./add_device.php <hostname> [any|nanp|anp|ap] [v3] [user] [password] [enckey] [md5|sha] [aes|des] [port] [udp|udp6|tcp|tcp6]

Adding multiple devices at once using a text file containing one line per device following the same format as the other two methods above:

./add_device.php <filename>

If you've configured default SNMP settings in your config.php, you can simply use :

./add_device.php <hostname>

And Observium will try the community strings and/or SNMPv3 authentication information you've configured and add the device if they are correct.

Troubleshooting

If a device fails to add, please ensure that you can ping it from your Observium server :

root@omega:/opt/observium# fping beta
beta is alive
root@omega:/opt/observium#

And that the SNMP agent on the device is correctly responding to the community string:

root@omega:/opt/observium# snmpget -v2c -c public beta sysObjectID.0
SNMPv2-MIB::sysObjectID.0 = OID: NET-SNMP-MIB::netSnmpAgentOIDs.10
root@omega:/opt/observium#