Context
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is one of the core protocols used to monitor and manage networked equipment. It remains particularly important in telecom, networking, infrastructure and embedded systems, where equipment exposes operational data and configuration through standardized or vendor-specific MIBs.
The Erlang/OTP platform includes a comprehensive SNMP implementation. It provides the foundations required to implement SNMP managers and agents, including MIB handling, instrumentation, access control and SNMPv3 security.
The project builds an idiomatic Elixir layer on top of the mature Erlang/OTP SNMP stack. It provides DSLs, macros and application-level abstractions for integrating SNMP into Elixir systems.
The objective is to make SNMP a first-class component of an Elixir/OTP application rather than an isolated piece of network-management infrastructure.
What I did
I designed and developed an Elixir library that abstracts the lower-level Erlang SNMP APIs behind declarative DSLs and Elixir-friendly data structures.
The project addresses the following aspects of building SNMP-enabled applications:
- SNMP agent DSL
- MIB integration and instrumentation
- MIB compilation
- Elixir representation of SNMP data
- OTP integration
- Ecto integration
- REST exposure of MIB data
Outcome
The library was published as an open-source package with generated API documentation and examples.
It has been adopted by the Elixir ecosystem, notably by the Nerves embedded
framework. The official Nerves examples
repository
includes two
applications based on elixir-snmp: hello_snmp_agent and
hello_snmp_manager.
This adoption demonstrates the library’s practical use for integrating SNMP into embedded Elixir/OTP systems.