[c-nsp] lack of snmp parity with cli

[James Bensley]

On 7 January 2016 at 11:13, Mike <mike-cisconsplist at tiedyenetworks.com> wrote:
> Hello group,
>
> I have a tool I developed in house which polls a cisco router terminating
> PPPoE sessions in order to get a complete picture of each active pppoe
> session. Most of what I want is available via snmp such as user name, ip
> address, the user mac address, and such. However, PPPoE Intermediate Agent
> tags - CircuitID and RemoteID - are apparently not available anywhere in
> snmp. That information apparently only shows up using the cli command "show
> pppoe session all", and so my tool polls with snmp first, and then follows
> up with a text login to the router and parses the cli output, finally
> stitching it all together at the end. Its quite hairy.
>
> This seems silly that there would be something important like these tags
> that can only be seen from the cli and not from snmp. I've went thru cisco's
> snmp object navigator quite a bit and I came up empty. I've also spent lots
> of time doing some pretty deep walks of the snmp tree trying to just pick
> out the right info but again it just doesn't seem to be implemented. Im sort
> of resigned to the idea that, yeah, they just don't make that available via
> snmp. Id just like some confirmation from others that my situation here
> isn't actually unusual and parsing the output from the cli for certain info
> is an accepted practice?

It's both common and annoying.

I have a dozen or so little tools, each one because I can't "do it via
SNMP" or some other “better” method. It's annoying because of the
obvious difficulties with different devices doing the same job or even
two of the same devices but on different IOS versions, will output the
same data differently. This means the scripts and tools are usually
50% just on interpretation, formatting, validating etc, the data that
is send/received via the CLI. Whatever task I’m trying to automate,
the main automation/task part of the tool/script is usually ends up
being the smallest.


Cheers,
James.