I have been administering servers and clients in small business offices, and have never used SNMP. But I have read about it and it looks interesting. As what I understand, it is mostly useful if you have a bigger network with a lot of network equipment that should be monitored.
Is there any useful use cases for SNMP in smaller networks? And is it recommended that I use it?
Best Answer
We currently use Cacti with SNMP to monitor our servers and network, and it is invaluable.
With SNMP, we get automatic host availability notification, so that if a server or firewall fails, it doesn't go unnoticed.
It allows us historical tracking of both performance, and in the case of servers, storage utilization. We can then identify potential upgrades, or re-allocation of resources when necessary.
It also gives us the ability to make pretty maps of our network utilization, to identify when and where there is a problem (using Cacti and Weathermap):
The more knowledge you have about your infrastructure, the better decisions you can make.