One of my popular videos is “Enabling SNMP on Windows 7 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdcZjbIa6PQ)”, which comes to no surprise when you consider the tremendous value and visibility you get from good old SNMP.
Let me start with a bit of a disclaimer and clarification; I am not proposing that you enable SNMP on all your PC’s. This is just something I do selectively to get more visibility while troubleshooting.
There many reasons and scenarios why I do this.
The most common is when I don’t have SNMP access to network equipment due to access-lists, or just corporate protocol. Sometimes I am working with the desktop or application group and need to figure out how much data the computer/application is transmitting. To top it off, there are many applications that can gather great stats like disk space, memory and services running via SNMP.
By using SNMP I don’t need the client’s login credentials or have them physically around when I need some stats. And if I’m fortunate enough to get SNMP access to network equipment, I don’t have to ask for login credentials.
Enjoy