snmp-cmds: The easiest portable SNMP library around

Documentation Status License: MIT Travis CI build status

snmp-cmds is a python library for communicating with a target device through SNMP

There’s like… dozens of SNMP libs out there. Why bother?

There are indeed many great SNMP libraries available for python.

Some, like PySNMP, are pure-python. This makes them incredibly portable across platforms, which is awesome, but also makes them relatively slow as well. Also, as amazing as PySNMP is, it isn’t exactly known for its ease of use.

Some, like the net-snmp bindings and easysnmp, are built as extensions to C libraries like Net-SNMP. This makes them incredibly fast and performant, but requires them to be compiled on each platform they’re distributed on, and compiled against specific versions of the Net-SNMP libraries. Not very portable at all.

In writing this library, I set out to find a middle ground. A library which could leverage the power and speed of the Net-SNMP project, while being portable pure-python and not being tied to any particular version of Net-SNMP. I accomplished this by making a library that calls the Net-SNMP binaries as subprocesses.

Although this library should work on Windows platform that have Net-SNMP installed, it has not yet been tested on Windows. Use with caution.

Requirements

This package requires the following software be installed on your system:

  • `Net-SNMP<http://net-snmp.org>`_ (can be installed with sudo apt-get install snmp on Ubuntu)

  • IETF RFC MIBs (can be installed with sudo apt-get install snmp-mibs-downloader on Ubuntu)

  • Python 3.5+

Install

The easy way:

pip3 install snmp-cmds

The hard way:

git clone https://github.com/alextremblay/snmp-cmds.git
cd snmp-cmds
pip install .

Usage: API

If you want to make several SNMP requests to one or two SNMP targets, you’ll want to use the API:

from snmp_cmds import Session

my_device = Session(ipaddress='10.0.0.1',
                    read_community='secret password',
                    write_community='SUPER secret password')

system_name_string = my_device.get(
                         oid='SNMPv2-MIB::sysName.0')

new_name_string = 'Lets rename this device'
my_device.set(oid='SNMPv2-MIB::sysName.0', value_type='s',
              value=new_name_string)

Session API methods: get, get_some, get_table, walk, set

Usage: Commands

If you want to make a few SNMP requests to many targets, consider using the individual snmp command functions; ex:

from snmp_cmds import snmpwalk

result = snmpwalk(community='my read password',
                  ipaddress='192.x.x.x',
                  oid='SNMPv2-MIB::system')

print(result)  # Prints a list of tuples, each tuple containing
               # the OID walked and the value found at that OID.

Available commands: snmpget snmpget. snmpgetsome, snmpwalk, snmptable, snmpset

For more information on the commands see Commands. For more information on the API see API.

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Indices and tables