What is the best SNMP implementation for Python?

Question

I'm doing some GUI prototyping with Python for an SNMP application. Looking around there seem to be a number of python libraries I could use. As I'm prototyping I value a nice clean easy API over speed and preferably a commonly packaged library. Obviously the package should be open source. So far I've been looking PySNMP, Twisted-Snmp, pynetsnmp and seafelt's libsnmp.

Answer 1

Net-Snmp has python bindings. Very simple (command-line like functions) access to SNMP functionality. If you use the Net-Snmp trap daemon, you can direct trap info to python (or any other language) scripts.

Answer 2

The most active project of "Security not my Problem" seems to be pycopia SNMP. I have no experience with any of them, but if you have troubles finding the correct one have a look at the mailinglist archives of the libraries to find the most active one. Those usually have the better API/implementation or at least more users.

Answer 3

I say the one I wrote last weekend:

http://code.google.com/p/multicore-snmp/

Full process based API to Net-SNMP which supports V1-V3.

Answer 4

I'd also be interested in your findings, just starting to look myself. Care to share them?

Answer 5

Of the libraries you mention I'd single out the python net-snmp library and pysnmp. One of my criteria for choosing well supported libraries is are they in debian/ubuntu and these both pass that test.

Net-snmp does come with python bindings. Net-snmp is in some ways the de-facto snmp library (for linux at least) so it is probably a good choice in that respect. However net-snmp is an extrememly large and gangly C library (which I've spent rather a lot of time hacking on and reading the source code) which is a downside.

The other alternative is a pure python snmp library - pysnmp which seems like a sensible choice, though I haven't actually tried that one. The twisted wrapper for it could come in handy.

If I was starting a new SNMP development I'd try pysnmp to see how well it works, but the old faithful (py)net-snmp is always there if you need it.

If you just want a bit of light usage of snmp then you can use the net-snmp command line tools very easily, eg

snmpget -c password host -v1 enterprises.318.1.1.12.2.3.1.1.2.1

To read the power usage of an APC powerbar, which would work fine for prototyping I would have thought.

[edit: one year later]

I've now had a chance to try the pysnmp library.

I wasn't happy with the stable branch 2.x, but the development 4.x works and has a lots of good features, including

• MIB loading
• Reasonably simple oneliner interface
• Full support of set/get/walk with bulk versions of those
• Sync and Async interface
• Support for server (agent) and client (manager)

I found it moderately complicated to work with, but I managed to work it out with help from the docs and the source code.

Top tip: set os.environ['PYSNMP_MIB_DIR'] to point to directories with your own converted mibs in, and use build-pysnmp-mib to make them, or if that doesn't work

smidump -k -f python My-MIB.txt | libsmi2pysnmp > My-MIB.py