SNMP Connection? (2019)

I’m a novice developer, more familiar with web technologies more than anything. I read that Groovy is very similar to Java. I was hoping to be able to connect to and read data from a device that supports SNMP. I am sure a SmartApp and a Device Type could be created to handle this, but there isn’t native support in SmartThings for SNMP. I found an old post from back to 2012 for someone asking about this, but nothing ever came of it. Any ideas on how to support SNMP that doesn’t involve going through another device to process all of that information? Could the SNMP4j library somehow be added to SmartThings? It seems like that would open a whole word of possibilities.

You can’t add libraries of any kind to smartthings itself. Many integrations for different projects are based on using a “ Man in the middle“ server to handle all that kind of stuff.

There was some effort about three years ago on the SNMP front That used a “man in the middle” approach, but I don’t think much ever came of it. There are a lot of security concerns these days with anything that’s allowed to harvest that much information from the network itself rather than through explicit requests.

So these days I think more people are using MQTT.

Yeah, I figured you couldn’t add your own libraries. I wanted to avoid the man in the middle approach because then I’m writing two tools (like the first post you referenced). I live in an area where the Internet isn’t always reliable, so connecting directly is an advantage because I don’t need to depend on the WAN being up which is why I went the ZigBee approach rather than WiFi for some more sensitive automated switches that run locally.

If the Internet isn’t always reliable where you live, then smartThings is not going to be a good fit for you. It is primarily a cloud-based system. No custom code can run locally, so anything you created for your own device would not run without the cloud being available. The mobile app will not be able to communicate with the hub at all unless the cloud is available. Really the only thing that works when the cloud is out is some parts of the official smart lights feature and then only with DTH is which are part of the stock set distributed to all customers.

Since you’re interested in ZIgbee, why don’t you look into Hubitat? It’s a tiny company, very new, but runs everything locally ( except the obvious third-party integrations like echo) so even if they go out of business tomorrow the stuff you have running will keep running.

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Thanks, I’ll check that out!

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