Hi all!

Attached is my new tool for getting SNMP-data into DMX. You may try/use it, if You are in network monitoring. Why do I need this?

Well, there are a lot of network monitoring tools out there like cacti, PRTG, Nagios etc. All have in common a quite complicated and time consuming setup. Most of those IT network monitoring tools need a webserver or even a database to be setup and maintained correctly. For steady installations those tools might be worth the effort and offer some nice GUI and grafics and we do use cacti for a long-term monitoring for years now.

But, another approach was: is it possible to get some data about my infrastructure into the MA console? Because when using a MA system, the most important components are already monitored via the network status or the message center. But that's all based on MA2 protocol and you can't implement other devices from other manufacturers into the same monitoring system. So a second monitoring device like a PC is needed. Again, if You have a big setup, that's a good job for a system engineer. If you have a smal setup and want to monitor just a few other devices, it's often a lot effort until you get a readable value onto the screen.

So I searched for an easy tool, but didn't find one. Finally I created one myself, which I like to share, if anybody is interested and doing SNMP already. What's so unique to my tool? It's some kind of gateway between SNMP and DMX via sACN.
You can patch any SNMP OID on any IPv4 device on the network (even routed) to a DMX-channel on one sACN universe!
With a DMX-value representing an OID-value, you can then do whatever DMX can do.
Ideas:

[*] drive LEDs for temperature, fanspeed, lifetime, networktraffic, ...
[*] use DMX-remote on consoles depending on SNMP-values; e.g. start/stop playback on specific temperatures
[*] ...

Attached is a screenshot of a MA2 layout showing the link-status and network io-traffic on the ports of a ethernet-switch. So you can monitor traffic and connections on any SNMP-enabled switch inside the MA2 GUI and even drive LED-sticks with that data or fire macros if a network connection goes down or drops from 1000Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s due to a faulty network cable.
You may also use any SNMP-enabled sensor for remote-controlling your show-playback. Any other ideas?

All you need is a Windows PC on the network running the attached tool. Setup a patch of OID/IP for DMX-channels, start requesting data by SNMP and send the results as sACN into the same or another network. If SNMP-results (often 32bit numbers) do not fit into the 8bit DMX-range, you can let the program try some calculation to squeeze the large numbers into a useful range.

Take a look at the attached manual for details and try the example for a 28-port-ethernet switch inside a MA2 layout. I've documented a lot, but you should be familiar with SNMP basics and sACN as well to succeed.
There are even customised fixtures to visualize DMX-values as switch-ports.

This project is not open-source but you may use it as is without any warranty and no claim for support. You may ask for help, post comments, feedback and feature-requests, but don't expect me to answer as soon as the post was submitted. This tool may help getting dimmer-feedback via SNMP into the console, but it does not have a special usecase yet other than the example of monitoring a switch inside a MA2 layout. I have ideas of converting also SNMP trap messages into DMX (by using an already ceated device/software to display DMX-values as text using ASCII-coding), but that's just an idea. So, feel free to try and comment.
Read the demo.txt for a quick getting-started with the attached example. Just download and unzip the file to any location. No installation needed, not registry spamed. Just run from the unziped program folder.

Thanks for reading
Gralf

PS: This tool uses the compiled dll of SnmpSharpNet.com