SNMP Watches

SNMP Watches let you monitor a specific value on any SNMP-capable device — a switch, a UPS, a printer, anything that answers SNMP — even though it has no Guardian agent of its own. You pick one of your existing agents to do the polling on your behalf, since the device usually lives on the same internal network as that agent.

How it works

SNMP devices almost always sit on a private LAN, not the public internet, so polling has to happen from somewhere on that network — Guardian’s hub can’t reach them directly. Each watch is assigned to one of your agents, which polls the target device every 5 minutes and reports the result back. A watch you add, edit, or pause in the dashboard takes effect on that agent’s next poll cycle automatically.

Adding a watch

From SNMP Watches in the sidebar, click + Add Watch and provide:

• Label — a name for what you’re watching, e.g. “UPS battery charge”
• Polling agent — which agent should reach out to the device
• Target host — the device’s IP or hostname
• OID — the specific SNMP object identifier to read
• Community — optional; leave blank to use the polling agent’s own configured SNMP community (v2c) or SNMPv3 identity
• Alert when value is above/below threshold, with separate Warning and Critical thresholds (both optional — a watch with no thresholds still records history, it just never alerts)

Status and history

Each watch shows its current value, status (OK, Warning, Critical, or Error), and when it was last polled. Click History to see up to 7 days of past readings.

An alert and incident fire the moment a watch’s status changes to Warning or Critical — not on every poll — and a recovery notice fires once it returns to OK. If a device stops answering (unreachable, wrong OID, etc.), the watch shows Error with the underlying failure message rather than silently going stale.

Removing a watch

Click the ✕ next to a watch to delete it, along with its polling history. This can’t be undone.

Related

Watches are polled by the same agents shown on the Agents page — an agent must already be deployed and online on the target device’s network before you can point a watch at it. Layer-2 switch topology (a separate, automatic feature) is covered in Guardian Flow.