Difference between WMI and SNMP

acgarcia1

Hi Community,

I am trying to install APM in a production environment that has Real Servers as well as Virtual Servers. I am confused with the term WMI and SNMP with regards to how Solarwinds APM monitor the servers, I mean will they use WMI or SNMP to poll for data?

Also, speaking of discovering servers in the " Network Discovery" pane procedure, it brings up about populating the necessary snmp credentials. Does it mean, we have to enable SNMP on the servers as well before it will be discovered? Also does this procedure follow with virtual servers? I have read through the Admin guide but since I dont have virtual servers to test it with, it's hard to imagine when it comes to discovering the virtual servers. When I came across the step on how to discover virtual devices, I was prompted for username credentials but it neevr mentioned of snmo though? Im confused on this part.

 

Please help.

 

Thanks.

aLTeReGo

Windows nodes can be added using WMI (a native Windows API) without the need to enable or configure SNMP. This is true for both physical and virtual Windows hosts. WMI requires Windows administrative credentials.  

You can optionally enable and configure SNMP on your Windows servers and monitor them via SNMP instead of WMI. In this case you would need to provide the appropriately configured SNMP community string for these devices to be discovered with Network Sonar.

VMWare hosts can be added as either ICMP or SNMP hosts depending if SNMP is configured on the ESX server. Additionally you can provide either your ESX root or vCenter credentials to monitor your VMWare infrastructure.