I have been tinkering around with snmp recently as a means to monitoring various equipment on a LAN. The protocol itself is fairly straightforward and I have been using the net-snmp module in node js and have no problem connecting and communicating with the various kit by various manufacturers on the LAN.
As not all the equipment is made by the same manufacturer I am having to use specific object identifiers (oids) for each manufacturer to get a response that the item is on-line and available for communication. The problem I have is that each indivdual piece of equipment can at any time be removed, swapped or replaced by a different item at any time. Therefore hard programming with various manufacturers oids is not really working without having my code looping through a list of each manufacturers unique oids to see if the equipment is present. However if a new manufacturer's equipment is installed then it will obvioulsy be ignored until a responsive oid is added to my program.
I have looked online extensively and cannot find a definitive answer as the best way to solve this.
My question therefore, is there an oid that you can query for a response that is universal across all manufacturers that will respond with some sort of message, or should I persist with creating a collection of oids specific to the equipment on my network? Has anyone else out there come across this issue and how did you solve it?
You can check SNMPv2-MIB sysDescr or sysObjectID to identify the vendor.