A decade ago, when today’s major players were competing hard  to establish as the lead player in the IT Network/Server Monitoring sector,  ManageEngine released its flagship product – OpManager – with a powerful web and java client. I can’t erase those days off my memory when we were running  pillar to post within the office space to configure SNMP on servers and  workstations to check if OpManager can pull all the essential performance  monitors.  Configuring SNMP on Windows  machines was never as easy as it is today on a Windows 2003/Windows 2008  Server. That was a time when the Windows Programs and Features required a CD or  a network installation and the Windows OS in most of the servers was OEM-ed  without the SNMP Package or the servers were assembled and upgraded as and when  required. It is totally a different ball game to install and configure SNMP on  linux boxes, but I will limit my discussion to Windows.

  In today’s IT, monitoring is an essential business objective  and almost all monitoring tools use SNMP. This is the default monitoring  protocol that comes bundled with any Operating System. You don’t need an expert  to help you configure SNMP on a Windows server. A quick look at the Microsoft  How-To or a basic knowledge of Windows Programs and Features is sufficient to  complete the job at hand.   Now let me post a volley of questions to know how you wish  to accomplish the job of enabling SNMP on your servers – Are you going to  configure SNMP on all your windows servers manually, waiting for the  installation to complete on your remote desktop or VNC screen? Are you going to  allow SNMP packets from all hosts? Are you going to let the default community  string stay as it is, so as to make your servers more vulnerable to external  attacks?

If you answered  No  to any/all of these questions, then you  are on the right track! Yes, ManageEngine has its own free tool – SNMP Enabler  – to enable administrators to configure SNMP on all Windows servers at one go.  Just that you have to import the list of servers through a txt file and you are  all set to configure SNMP in a few clicks. It doesn’t stop here. SNMP Enabler  installs the package on those missing servers and enables it on those servers on  which it finds the package.  It also keeps  a log of successful and failed servers with relevant messages to troubleshoot.

Pssst… : I intend to do a series of posts logging my  interesting IT management experiences the last few years. Besides serving as  useful information or at times as an account of how entertaining IT can be, I’d  also like to save this as a reading for posterity ;) And do follow this group to stay tuned!

AK