Support SNMP for Domino on docker

I took a look into SNMP. The documentation isn't great ..

Are you sure you need the agent inside the container?

Doesn't the lnsnmp belong on the host? There should be only one instance and you can only get stats from one system.

SNMP service -> lnsnmp -> quryset & intrcpt

Do you really want lnsnmp inside the container? I think it would more belong to the host.
In that case there is no need to modify the container image for SNMP support.

You are the first one asking for SNMP support for Domino container images.
Most admins moved away from collecting stats via SNMP and it is quite limited.

There are multiple components involved with SNMP. I am not concerned about the servertask, but the other components which would need to be started.

A container has no systemd and we would need to start the agent separately.

How do you start it today with normal Linux servers? There isn't a systemd script. It's still the old init.d script.

We could potentially solve it by adding it to the Domino start script which is also used for the container image.
So we could get SNMP for both Linux and the container image.

See here for the general request:

https://domino-ideas.hcltechsw.com/ideas/DOMINO-I-516

But usually SNMP is started outside the server in it's own systemd service.

Domino SNMP can only handle one partition. So it would need to be executed inside the container.
I would let it start it in the entrypoint script of the container.

Or start it by the start script if configured -- which does not make a big difference for the container, because the entrypoint script calls the start script.

Would it be OK to run the SNMP base agent as the notes user? The container does not allow to run processes as root.

-- Daniel

Hello. We use SNMP traps with the Zabbix monitoring system. Zabbix is the central monitoring system of the company for all services, including Domino. Zabbix receives Domino statistics, by using SNMP, including number of mail messages waiting to be routed, number of mail messages in message queue on hold, dead Mail, index server availability. Events Zabbix monitoring system resolve Help Desk specialists, don't Domino administrator. Also Zabbix monitors state containers and hosts by zabbix agent install on hosts. We can't follow statistics Domino on Docker, using Zabbix monitoring.

Thanks for your idea!
Can you provide more details about what you are trying to monitor and for which type of deployment?

Is this for a larger scale Docker based deployment? In this case do you have multiple containers running per Docker host?

In general you usually monitor Domino containers in a different way. In theory the SNMP service could run inside the container. But SNMP in general is quite rarely used in the Domino world. There are many other ways to query Domino statistics infromation and also checks if the Domino server is running.

• What use case do you have behind SNMP?

• Which type of information are you getting from SNMP which you can't get with other functionality?

Also would you rather consider to try monitoring the whole Docker host depending on what type of information you want?
Just saying you need SNMP for Docker support will not help to justify the business need.

Also the Domino container image comes with a health probe, which integrates with Docker and also Kubernetes.
This includes Liveness, Readiness status --> https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/configure-liveness-readiness-startup-probes/

[ Daniel Nashed / HCL Lifetime Ambassador & one of the maintainers of the Domino Container image ]