You want a monitoring tool — Zabbix, Cacti, LibreNMS, or something similar — to poll a MikroTik router for interface counters, CPU, and health metrics over SNMP. Turning SNMP on is one command, but leaving it wide open with the default public community and no address restriction hands anyone who can reach the router a free inventory of your network.
Enable the SNMP service
/snmp set enabled=yesCreate a dedicated read-only community
Give it a name that isn't public, restrict which addresses can query it, and make sure write access is off — a monitoring tool only ever needs to read:
/snmp community add name=monitoring-ro addresses=10.0.0.0/24 read-access=yes write-access=noRemove or restrict the default public community
The built-in public community has no address restriction by default. Either remove it if nothing depends on it:
/snmp community remove [find name=public]or, if something still points at it, at least lock it down to the same restricted address range as the one above.
Point your monitoring tool at the router
Configure your NMS to poll the router's management IP using SNMP v2c (or v3, if your tool supports it) with the community string you created. Confirm it's pulling data with a quick manual query if you have snmpwalk available:
snmpwalk -v2c -c monitoring-ro 10.0.0.1 systemWhy do it this way
SNMP with an unrestricted public community is a passive reconnaissance vector — anyone who can reach UDP 161 can pull your device inventory, interface names, and traffic counters without ever needing to log in. Restricting the community to the specific subnet your monitoring server lives on, and using a name that isn't the well-known default, closes off exactly the same kind of opportunistic scanning that targets default admin passwords, just on a different service. It costs nothing in monitoring capability and removes a source of free information about your network.
How MoniTik helps
If the reason you're setting up SNMP is to get visibility into device health and interface traffic, MoniTik gives you that same class of data — health checks, bandwidth, CPU, connectivity — without having to stand up and maintain an SNMP poller of your own. For teams that don't already run an NMS, it's one less piece of infrastructure to operate just to answer "is this router okay right now."
Camila focuses on routing, VPNs, and hardening MikroTik deployments for small and mid-size networks.