SNMP / WMI: Configuring New Environment for NPM

Question

Good morning all,

We're in the process of establishing a new Solarwinds NPM / SAM monitor at one of our sites. This is replacing old outdated information, and we're taking the approach that starting from scratch is going to be better here. In this regard, we're running into two questions that have plagued me for quite a few days, so I wanted to get direct opinions on the matter. Without further adieu:

* SNMP or WMI?* The majority of our environment is going to be Windows Servers, however there are a couple linux servers and networking devices that are going to be monitored as well. I was reading old information about how WMI had some bugs (2013). Has this improved? I know WMI is going to be enabled on all of the Windows devices out of the box, which makes this seem more appealing due to issue #2...

* Mass enabling of SNMP / SNMP settings* I have been searching around for this. There used to be an application in Windows that you could run psexec against and enable SNMP. I see my domain already has an existing GPO that updates the SNMP settings, but through my research everything I am looking at says use the registry changes instead of the GPO. Do we know why that is? Do we know what we can do to enable SNMP on newer servers that don't have that default application anymore?

Thanks!

mesverrum · Answer

If you only have NPM then server interfaces aren't available to monitor, they consider that to be a feature of SAM

punkrulz · Answer

Thanks for the responses guys (and sorry about the delay). We've decided to progress this by using WMI per your recommendations. Unfortunately when the network discovery runs, I'm getting a message that there were 0 interfaces found (but the servers were found). I'm attempting to troubleshoot this now.

bourlis · Answer

My 2 cents....  for data equipment go SNMP v3 with the strongest auth/priv mode the equipment will support.  Stay away from SNMP v1 & v2 at all cost, the simplicity isn't worth it.  My take on it is this, as far as I know 'no company or IT staff has ever made the news for having too strong of a network standard'.

As for WMI vs SNMP vs agent based the same argument should be made.  What's the most secure and most feature packed option that works best for your environment?  With out a doubt, agent based, WMI and SNMP all offer different features and each as their own pros & cons. Take a look at these KB articals, hopefully something there will help decide.

* Feature availability based on monitoring methods — with agents or agentless using SNMP or WMI - SolarWinds Worldwide, LL…
* Deciding between agent vs. agentless polling methods on the Edit Application Monitor page in SAM - SolarWinds Worldwide,…
* How do I choose which polling method to use in SAM? - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support