gosnmp VS OpenMetrics

As a maintainer of the Prometheus SNMP exporter, and the defacto standard implementation of SNMP in Go, I can tell you exactly how convoluted SNMP is at a protocol and specification level.

Source: I help maintain open source SNMP libraries and SNMP pollers.

SNMP, while really well implemented and has stood the test of time, blows. I say this as someone with extensive experience with SNMP, including maintaining code libraries and SNMP monitoring tools.

The latter is both the "official" client (under the prometheus GitHub org) and the author's own evolution path from the former. More importantly, it enforces that all metrics comply with the OpenMetrics specification.

The compatibility problem is "solved" when you have an objective compliance test. Like this one, for an OpenMetrics endpoint, that really makes it fast and easy to verify my code.

The new defacto standard metrics protocol is based on Prometheus metrics format. It's now published as OpenMetrics.

This is something that is actually on the road map, and something I have been assigned to. So you can expect to see this in the future, I will likely be implementing OpenMetrics endpoints that will be compliant with Prometheus & possibly promtail for Loki. I hope our status page located at `/status` will do for now.

The Prometheus format is now standardized as OpenMetrics, with a small test suite that I've used successfully. A quick websearch doesn't turn up any evidence that Umbrella or Office365 support it. I'm not aware of any explicit monitoring points for either service.

Yup. I worked on the RFC for this.

For example, OpenMetrics/Prometheus allows for much more sane monitoring format than SNMP. All "MIB" information is inline, it's served over HTTP, and it's supported by a lot of different monitoring systems.

Prometheus has established itself as a standard open-source tool for event monitoring and alerting and metrics collection. With OpenMetrics now a CNCF sandbox project, and OpenTracing and OpenCensus merging to become OpenTelemetry, opportunities have been created for new companies to provide monitoring and diagnostics solutions. While Datadog remains the 800-pound gorilla, a large number of startups and smaller players are offering a variety of monitoring solutions, and even finding a niche in deeper diagnostics, including more comprehensive solutions that include infrastructure level, Kubernetes cluster level, and microservice applications level monitoring and diagnostics all in one place, to help pinpoint the production issues quickly. I also saw a few vendors offering predictive diagnostic solutions. It seems the monitoring solution market will continue to be fragmented, with a couple of larger players and a number of smaller players competing on innovation.

Prometheus wants data in a specific format (value_name{label1="value1"} numbericValue) and an "exporter" is a middleware that reads data from something and exports it in Prometheus-compatible format (the format is being "opened" as OpenMetrics).