SNMP Monitoring System

[Justin d'Entremont]

Who out there is using some sort of SNMP monitoring system for their booth equipment?

I tried using Nagios with our Doremi and Christie gear, and I really liked it, but the free version only allows for a certain number of devices/OIDs to be monitored, and as such I couldn't add everything I wanted to for all three screens at hand.
While I liked it, there is no way I can justify $2,000 or more for it.

On a related note, at some point in the future, I'd like to gather up a bunch of real-time SNMP information and put it together into a pretty "Site Overview" mobile/web app that I could pull up on my phone and see how everything is doing (ie. what SPL is playing on each screen, what is the lamp status, lamp hours, current house lighting status etc). I have such a thing for my house, and currently have one for the "ground floor operations" at the theater as well (Alarm system, HVAC, lobby & exterior lights etc.), and figured it's time to add the booth stuff too.

Example:

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[Marcel Birgelen]

There are quite some SNMP monitoring tools out there. Most of them are optimized for servers and networking gear though.

I've been using LibreNMS as a more modern alternative for Nagios, but there are quite a few others, like Icinga, Zabbix and Prometheus. Besides that, there are commercial alternatives, like SolarFlare.

[Bruce Cloutier]

The JNIOR supports SNMP although I off-hand don't recall to what extent. It may have been an original requirement for Cinemark. There is an SNMP.jar file distributed with the product in the /flash folder which reports JNIOR information and status. It is not running by default. If you want to experiment with that and need more information you can contact Kevin here at INTEG or search jnior.com for snmp. The application notes are probably written for the Series 3. If you feel that it can be useful we can look into any tweaks you may think it needs. I don't recall if anyone is actively using it.

You can also use the JNIOR (that you might already have) to do some monitoring. We have pieced that together for some along the way. If you are able to do web design you can do a lot on your own. Basically (talking Series 4 JNIOR) our configuration pages come up when you point your browser at the JNIOR. You can move those out of the way by moving and/or renaming the /flash/www.zip folder. If you rename and move that to /flash/www/config.zip you can build a custom website in /flash/www and still access the configuration stuff by adding /config to the URL. That /flash/www.zip library contains the default web content and the sources there are not obfuscated. The JANOS web server knows how to serve an entire site directly out of a library like that. You are welcome to look into what we have done there and use whatever. Although, we did not work to keep that simple and easy for most to understand. Anyway, we encourage and support people working to better utilize their JNIOR. You can just hit us up with questions.

[Steve Guttag]

Most every NOC uses SNMP for monitoring sites. For cinemas, there are several software packages, mostly web based so they can be monitored anywhere, out there. A lot of dealing with SNMP seems to be figuring out just what information is provided (you are dependent on the manufacturer for that) and then filtering out all of information that isn't valuable to you (do you want to be paged every time a dowser opens/closes?). Getting it to a good point is not a small undertaking.

[Harold Hallikainen]

The S in SNMP means Simple, but it's not! I implemented SNMP (get only, no put or traps) in the QSC/USL JSD-100, JSD-60, and LSS-100/200. I used the command line netsnmp to test.

Harold

[Marcel Birgelen]

SNMP once started out as a simple idea, a pretty simple UDP based protocol, until people started to realize that it's all not that simple... it's not really rocket science either though.

Since SNMP OIDs are essentially just numbered addresses, you need so called MIBs to make sense of those numbers. Those numbers resolve to short names, which are already a bit more descriptive than just the numbers. In order what each property actually means, you still need some good documentation.

We're now at version 3 of the protocol, which isn't really all that popular. Version 3 implements users, which should replace the idea of the "SNMP community", it also supports TLS encryption. In the early implementations, security was much of a hindsight. For completely isolated networks that's usually still fine, but given the mixed-used aspect of some networks and the increasing difficulty to keep them isolated from the outside, those features might not just be luxury features...