I work at a network operations software platform / service company (Augtera Networks). Our customers are seeing dramatic reductions in the number of incidents / tickets in their workflows, seeing anomalies in their network they have never seen before, and seeing early warning signs of future failures. We spend a good amount of time explaining the whiz bang tech we use to achieve these results, so we sometimes get interesting reactions when we reveal the amount of effort we have put into a powerful and scalable SNMP “engine”, and also our claims that it works! (SNMP is notoriously difficult).
For example, we recently presented at Network Field Day 28. When the discussion of SNMP arose, one of the NFD28 delegates tweeted this:
The 80’s wants its SNMP back 🤣🤣🤣 That did bring a smile to my face. I do not know the first time I heard the acronym SNMP, but I do know it was a loooooong time ago!
So why would a cutting-edge technology company even bother with SNMP, and not just focus on OpenConfig, gRPC, gNMI et al?
This week I was listening to an interview with the founder of an observability platform, and I was reminded of why. This founder explained the exact reasons why network operations products have to leverage SNMP so much:
It is in every network
Supported by deployed equipment
No two vendor data models are the same
It provides the information needed to do the job, while other approaches are still maturing
Anyone who has spent any time in a product management position or a strategy position, knows the drill. You always want to be intercepting the next wave. You don’t want to spend a whole bunch of time and money on something that is going to be replaced. The propensity is always to focus on that next wave, and hope that wave comes along fast enough for you to catch it.
Well, as the old saying goes. In the short term, change is much slower than you expect, and in the long term much faster.
In the short term, at least, multiple network operations tool vendors are realizing the reality of equipment in networks. What is there is there, and it is going to be there for a while. Once installed, equipment is sticky, and if you want to create great customer experiences for more than greenfield deployments, and if you want to make great customer experiences period, then SNMP is still the way to go today.
Tool vendors will of course support OpenConfig, gRPC, gNMI, and no doubt, streaming telemetry is most likely the better approach in the long run, but for now, a great SNMP implementation is what gets the job done.