Monitoring NetApp in SAM: PowerShell vs SNMP?

Question

Hello Thwack Community - 
 I'm working with my team to setup NetApp monitoring. Before we look into leveraging SRM, we'd like to see how much we can achieve with monitoring NetApp via SAM. 
 I've been browsing Thwack and was pleased to discover that NetApp has a PowerShell toolkit that can be leveraged. 
 Has anyone setup NetApp monitoring in SAM and would know the pros / cons of using PowerShell vs SNMP? Since PowerShell hits the NetApp API, is it safe to assume that PowerShell would pull in "better" data than SNMP traps from NetApp? 
 
 Thank you in advance!

adam.beedell · Accepted Answer

SNMP is a bit of a nightmare without something to process it. You can get a top-level capacity readout, or some traps when issues occur if you're lucky (Having several pitfalls here at the mo on the netapp end, inc sending from unexpected IPs). An equivalent spec to SRM wouldnt be pratical with UNDP or SAM SNMP alone. With powershell the template you might find on here is a bit out of date but can be adjusted a bit for the newer netapp module. I've found the module command for antivirus doesnt work properly. API polling is alright depending what exactly you're trying to do. I tried to do one for a netapp/emc unity recently and it requires a cookie that's not well documented, very annoying. The powershell SAM monitor wants you to pull back a small, actionable amount of data, so not ideal for like "list all the cifs" or "give me all the discs", but "Count the bad disks, and give me their serial" would work You can do SSH over the sam powershell module too which means you have access to the command line functions. You can also use the solarwinds API/SQL and the netapp api/module to bulk-pull data and stick it in a table for later use. It's all doable but can be a pain.

Monitoring NetApp in SAM: PowerShell vs SNMP?

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