SNMP a heavy way to monitor Servers?

[Jvona]

I have a co-worker who very much dislikes cacti for monitoring servers, he tells me snmp uses to much resources.
I cannot find documentation anywhere or have I noticed any problems with polling these. I would love to hear your opinions and if you know of a site that discusses this that would be great!

- Jason

[TheWitness]

Jason,

Almost every monitoring system uses SNMP. The load it places on a system is insignificant, unless you have a poorly designed snmp agent on the polled host.

The person for whom you are referring to more than likely experienced a poorly written agent, or may just not know what he/she is talking about.

The most popular agent is net-snmp. It is so flexible, that an administrator can execute any random script on the remote box and make it a "get"'able OID. If the script is poorly written, the agent will load up the system. It's best to have a good systems administrator.

TheWitness

[jt]

Whoever that is I'm thinking doesn't have much experience in the area. SNMP is the standard way to get this information, and it's also the way multi layerd switches are accessed for management.

It's like saying you don't like cars becuase they use gas.