CentOS virt - Aug 2012 - SNMP monitoring

It seems it's not possible to monitor kvm virtual image network interfaces
 via SNMP. MRTG's cfgmaker says

### The following interface is commented out because:
### * has no ifSpeed property

 and other monitors are consistently reporting that vm's interfaces are
 exceeding traffic thresholds (even on lo ...). Which is no surprise if
 the threshold is zero.

 I found a hint on some Debian forum that this behaviour is caused by the
 virtio driver. So I was wondering, is it recommended or are there advantages
 to configuring one of the emulated drivers instead (ne2k_pci,i82551,i82557b,
 i82559er,rtl8139,e1000,pcnet)? Or can I "fake it" somehow in the
vm's snmpd
 config?

Lars Hecking <lhecking at ...> writes:
>  It seems it's not possible to monitor kvm virtual image network
interfaces
>  via SNMP. MRTG's cfgmaker says
> 
> ### The following interface is commented out because:
> ### * has no ifSpeed property
I had the same issue, but only with some of my virtual machines.
I found that the Network adapter needed to be changed 
(or rather removed and a new one added) 
from type "flexible" to "E1000".  
Doing that with the machine powered off, it kept the same MAC address. 
Then the SNMP works / sees the ifspeed correctly.

hope this helps,
Joe

joetesta writes:
> Lars Hecking <lhecking at ...> writes:
> 
> >  It seems it's not possible to monitor kvm virtual image network
interfaces
> >  via SNMP. MRTG's cfgmaker says
> > 
> > ### The following interface is commented out because:
> > ### * has no ifSpeed property
> 
> I had the same issue, but only with some of my virtual machines.
> I found that the Network adapter needed to be changed 
> (or rather removed and a new one added) 
> from type "flexible" to "E1000".  
> Doing that with the machine powered off, it kept the same MAC address. 
> Then the SNMP works / sees the ifspeed correctly.
 I set up a new vm for testing and yes, this seems to work.

 Thanks, Joe!