SNMP Data Caching

I’m looking at doing some basic SNMP caching for my Nagios system, and wondered if anyone was doing the same and why or why not.

Here is the issue. I am checking about 70 hosts, with a total of about 300 services. Many of the checks use SNMP. This is not an unworkable amount of traffic, but it seems like I could reduce the traffic and the load on the devices being checked if I could cache the SNMP results they return.

I am only looking at a very short caching duration, something like 2 or 3 minutes. Its just that some devices have 5 or 6 checks being run against them over SNMP, so that means 5 or 6 separate queries basically returning the same data to be parsed through.

I’m not sure if the idea of a caching proxy would work, or if there are good reasons against it. What do you guys think?