[BBLISA] statistics-based zero config network management: why doesnt this exist?

[Brian O'Neill]

On 8/4/2013 8:21 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (bblisa4) wrote:
> The thing is:  Very rarely is SNMP sufficient.  For most devices, it counts no more than a ping monitor.  If you want reliable statistics of cpu, disk, network, memory usage, you have to install an agent.  I emphasize reliable.  Because although SNMP technically supports all that, I've never seen it usable for that purpose.
>

I use it all the time for network, disk, CPU and memory monitoring on my 
Linux boxes using Net-SNMP.

Windows, on the other hand, is more of a problem. SNMP out of the box on 
Windows only exposes network info. You can add SNMP-Informant - the free 
version adds disk space, CPU and memory, but the memory monitoring isn't 
terribly useful from what I've found. And I'm running into problems with 
reliability, not due to SNMP itself, but Windows implementation of it. 
On some systems, it is just really slow at times getting even a small 
amount of info, like space used on a single volume system. It also 
doesn't appear to be a complete version 2 implementation (does not 
support getbulkrequest). Windows doesn't seem to want to support 
anything for monitoring but their own, like WMI, and even then they seem 
non-committal - we investigated Exchange 2010 (or maybe 2007 - I forget 
how long ago) monitoring via WMI, and there were indications they didn't 
plan on providing the data...I think they did eventually provide it. But 
WMI can also be slow when accessing remotely, and sometimes requires 
elevated credentials that depending on the local bureaucracy might not 
be possible.

On network devices, it depends on the manufacturer, but most of the big 
ones will give you decent info. Finding the MIBs to know what the info 
actually is can be a challenge.