SNMPD service fails to start

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Unable to start SNMPD service.

Symptoms:
Starting snmpd service fails via gui and cli.



/etc/init.d/snmpd start
root: snmpd has not been enabled.

Environment

VMware vSphere 6.x
VMware vSphere 6.7.x
VMware vSphere 7.x

Cause

snmpd target isn’t configured

[root@esx]esxcli system snmp get
   Authentication:
   Communities:
   Enable: false
   Engineid:
   Hwsrc: indications
   Largestorage: true
   Loglevel: info
   Notraps:
   Port: 161
   Privacy:
   Remoteusers:
   Syscontact:
   Syslocation:
   Targets:
   Users:
   V3targets:

[root@esx]esxcli system snmp test
must first configure at least one v1|v2c|v3 trap target

Resolution

Follow the below steps in the ssh session of the host

Get the monitoring server IP address and use it as a target
esxcli system snmp set --targets=snmp_ip@port/communityname
example:
esxcli system snmp set –targets=x.x.x.x@161/public
Note: default port(UDP)and common community string has been used as a reference
enable snmp
esxcli system snmp set --enable true
validate if the target is configured
esxcli system snmp test
restart the snmpd service
/etc/init.d/snmpd restart
allow SNMP traffic in your ESXi host firewall, to allow SMNP requests from any device on the network:

esxcli network firewall ruleset set --ruleset-id snmp --allowed-all true
esxcli network firewall ruleset set --ruleset-id snmp --enabled true
esxcli network firewall refresh

you can now start the snmpd service from the GUI or CLI