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SNMP Monitoring for Homelab Network Devices

Monitoring 2026-03-04 · 3 min read snmp monitoring networking homelab prometheus grafana switch ups
By HomeLab Starter Editorial Team — Home lab enthusiasts covering hardware setup, networking, and self-hosted services for home and small office environments.

Most homelab monitoring focuses on servers — CPU, memory, disk, network interfaces. But switches, UPS units, APs, and other network hardware expose their own metrics via SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). With the Prometheus SNMP Exporter, you can pull switch port statistics, UPS battery status, AP client counts, and more into your existing Grafana dashboards.

Photo by lonely blue on Unsplash

What SNMP Exposes

Network devices expose metrics via OIDs (Object Identifiers) — a hierarchical numbering system for device attributes:

SNMP versions:

For homelab on a trusted internal network, SNMPv2c is common and simple to configure.

Enable SNMP on Common Devices

Mikrotik Switches

/snmp
set enabled=yes contact="admin@local" location="homelab" trap-version=2

/snmp community
set [ find default=yes ] name=public read-access=yes

Or via Winbox/WebFig: IP → SNMP → Enable, set community name.

Ubiquiti UniFi

In the UniFi controller: Settings → System → SNMP → Enable. Community: public (default, change if desired) SNMP version: v2c or v3

Cisco/Catalyst switches

snmp-server community public RO
snmp-server location homelab
snmp-server contact admin

APC UPS (Network Management Card)

The APC NMC exposes extensive UPS metrics via SNMP. Access via the card's web interface: Administration → Network → SNMP → Enable.

TrueNAS

System → SNMP → Enable. Set community string and location.

Synology NAS

Control Panel → Terminal & SNMP → SNMP → Enable.

Verify SNMP Is Working

From your monitoring server:

# Install snmpwalk
sudo apt install snmp snmp-mibs-downloader

# Test: walk the device's MIB tree
snmpwalk -v2c -c public 192.168.1.1

# Get a specific OID (system description)
snmpget -v2c -c public 192.168.1.1 1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1.0

# Walk interface table
snmpwalk -v2c -c public 192.168.1.1 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2

If you get output, SNMP is working.

Prometheus SNMP Exporter

The SNMP Exporter converts SNMP OIDs to Prometheus metrics:

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  snmp_exporter:
    image: prom/snmp-exporter:latest
    container_name: snmp_exporter
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 9116:9116
    volumes:
      - ./snmp.yml:/etc/snmp_exporter/snmp.yml

The snmp.yml configuration file maps OIDs to metric names. Pre-built configurations exist for common vendors.

Download pre-built configs

The SNMP Exporter generator creates vendor-specific configs. The snmp_exporter GitHub repository includes configs for:

# Download the generator output for common MIBs
curl -o snmp.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/prometheus/snmp_exporter/main/snmp.yml

The default snmp.yml is quite large — consider using the generator to create a minimal config for just your devices.

Prometheus Configuration

# prometheus.yml scrape config
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: "snmp_switches"
    static_configs:
      - targets:
          - 192.168.1.1  # Mikrotik switch
          - 192.168.1.2  # Another switch
    metrics_path: /snmp
    params:
      auth: [public_v2]   # Authentication profile from snmp.yml
      module: [if_mib]    # Which MIB module to use
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__address__]
        target_label: __param_target
      - source_labels: [__param_target]
        target_label: instance
      - target_label: __address__
        replacement: snmp_exporter:9116

  - job_name: "snmp_ups"
    static_configs:
      - targets:
          - 192.168.1.50  # APC UPS
    metrics_path: /snmp
    params:
      auth: [public_v2]
      module: [apcups]
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__address__]
        target_label: __param_target
      - source_labels: [__param_target]
        target_label: instance
      - target_label: __address__
        replacement: snmp_exporter:9116

Key Metrics to Dashboard

Switch port throughput

# Inbound traffic rate per port (bytes/sec)
rate(ifInOctets{job="snmp_switches"}[5m]) * 8  # bits/sec

# Total network traffic across all ports
sum(rate(ifOutOctets{job="snmp_switches"}[5m])) by (ifName)

Interface errors

# Error rate on switch ports
rate(ifInErrors{job="snmp_switches"}[5m])

UPS battery

# APC UPS battery capacity %
upsAdvBatteryCapacity{job="snmp_ups"}

# Estimated runtime (minutes)
upsAdvBatteryRunTimeRemaining{job="snmp_ups"} / 6000

# UPS load %
upsAdvOutputLoad{job="snmp_ups"}

Grafana Dashboard

The Grafana dashboard library has pre-built SNMP dashboards:

Import them: Dashboards → Import → Enter ID.

LibreNMS Alternative

If you prefer a dedicated network monitoring tool over Prometheus/Grafana, LibreNMS is a self-hosted alternative:

services:
  librenms:
    image: librenms/librenms:latest
    container_name: librenms
    ports:
      - 8000:8000
    environment:
      DB_HOST: librenms-db
      DB_NAME: librenms
      DB_USER: librenms
      DB_PASSWORD: changeme
      APP_KEY: base64:random-key

LibreNMS auto-discovers devices via SNMP, generates graphs, sends alerts, and includes pre-built dashboards for hundreds of device types.

Alerting

With Prometheus AlertManager, alert on SNMP metrics:

# alerts.yml
groups:
  - name: network
    rules:
      - alert: SwitchPortHighErrors
        expr: rate(ifInErrors[5m]) > 10
        for: 5m
        annotations:
          summary: "High error rate on {{ $labels.ifName }}"

      - alert: UPSBatteryLow
        expr: upsAdvBatteryCapacity < 30
        for: 2m
        annotations:
          summary: "UPS battery at {{ $value }}%"

SNMP monitoring rounds out a homelab observability stack — once you have switch port utilization and UPS status in Grafana alongside your server metrics, you have a complete picture of your infrastructure health.

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