Hello,
I am adding a bunch of Windows servers to monitoring in Orion on SolarWinds. My question is, which is a better and more "robust" polling method? SNMP or WMI?
Personally I'd say SNMP but we monitor so few servers via our NPM that I probably don't have a shot in this game. What I can do is point you at @adatole article SNMP v WMI pros and cons. I might also suggest a mix and match approach having read that article so it really depends on what you want/need to monitor and what you intend to do with those monitors.
Thank you to Stuartd for the shout out. That comparison is pretty old at this point, although there are still some interesting insights in it.
That said, I would note that WMI requires all ports from 1024 up (through 65535) to be open. Not optimal for situations involving a firewall. So I would like to add "agents" to the mix of options (which weren't in existence at the time of my post). To get down to brass tacks, for modern Windows servers, I would opt for "not SNMP" first and foremost; and then select either WMI or agents based on the use case as well as your appetite to potentially roll out another piece of software to your fleet of systems.
HTH
