How to apply non WMI application monitors

FormerMember

   I'm setting up a new solarwinds envrionment with NPM and SAM. In the past I can remember applying two different kinds of application templates. One was WMI and I don't remember the other kind. I do remember that WMI had some overhead on the server. I'm looking at the built in templates for active directory and I don't see a choice for wmi or any other. Are all the templates now WMI? How do I apply the template that will monitor but not have resource overhead on my server? Thanks for your help.

aLTeReGo

In the very early days of APM some duplicate templates were released; one using WMI and the other using SNMP. That wasn't to say that WMI was bad, rather way back then APM's implementation of WMI was a little immature and somewhat unreliable under certain circumstances. Back then APM was only available as an add-on module for for NPM, could not run standalone, and there was no ability to add nodes to Orion using WMI. With that being said, the the simplest/easiest method for monitoring servers already managed in Orion was via SNMP since there was no need for additional credentials etc. It just worked.

The difficulty with SNMP however, is that the level of application information available using that protocol is extremely limited. In most cases there isn't any application information available via SNMP beyond basic processes running.

Today, the majority of our Windows based application templates are far more comprehensive, leveraging WMI and/or RPC. These are native Windows protocols and APIs that do not tax the monitored server, and have been proven to scale upwards of 10,000 components on a single SAM server reliably.