Book Image

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor: Deployment and Administration

By : Justin Brant
Book Image

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor: Deployment and Administration

By: Justin Brant

Overview of this book

As a network or system administrator, your primary responsibility is to ensure high availability of all managed IT services. There are a number of monitoring tools available; but these can be complicated and expensive, and may only monitor certain areas of your network. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is an intuitive, all-encompassing, yet cost effective, enterprise-level network monitoring service. A concise and practical, hands-on guide that will teach you how utilize SolarWinds SAM. It provides step-by-step tutorials to walk you through every feature, while teaching you how to tailor the product to your own network environment. This book will guide you through equipping your network devices and servers for SolarWinds SAM utilization. It will provide a sequential, hands-on overview of the product, and is suited for networks of all sizes, ranging from small businesses to larger enterprises. You will learn how to populate SolarWinds SAM with nodes, then classify and group nodes to tailor the product to your network environment. By doing so, you will benefit from key features such as automated alerts, traps, and reports. Each feature is explained in a practical and useful manner via tutorials and real-world examples to help you start monitoring your network quickly and efficiently, while keeping security implications in mind by applying enterprise-level best practices.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Enabling and configuring SNMP on Windows


Procedures listed in this section will explain how to enable SNMP and then assign a community string, on Windows Server 2008 R2.

Note

All Windows server-related procedures in this book are performed on Windows Server 2008 R2. Procedures vary slightly in other supported versions.

Installing an SNMP service on Windows

This procedure explains how to install the SNMP service on Windows Server 2008 R2.

  1. Log in to a Windows server.

  2. Navigate to Start Menu | Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Server Manager.

    Tip

    In order to see Administrative Tools in the Control Panel, you may need to select View by: Small Icons or Large Icons.

  3. Select Features and click on Add Features.

  4. Check SNMP Services, then click on Next and Install.

  5. Click on Close.

Assigning an SNMP community string on Windows

This procedure explains how to assign a community string on Windows 2008 R2, and ensure that the SNMP service is configured to run automatically on start up.

  1. Log in to a Windows server.

  2. Navigate to Start Menu | Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Services.

  3. Double-click on SNMP Service.

  4. On the General tab, select Automatic under Startup type.

  5. Select the Agent tab and ensure Physical, Applications, Internet, and End-to-end are all checked under the Service area.

  6. Optionally, enter a Contact person and system Location.

  7. Select the Security tab and click on the Add button under Accepted community names.

  8. Enter a Community Name and click on the Add button. For example, we used S4MS3rv3r. We recommend using something secure, as this is a password.

    Note

    Community String and Community Name mean the same thing.

    Tip

    READ ONLY community rights will normally suffice. A detailed explanation of community rights can be found on the author's blog: http://justinmbrant.blogspot.com/

  9. Next, tick the Accept SNMP packets from these hosts radio button.

  10. Click on the Add button underneath the radio buttons and add the IP of the server you have designated as the SolarWinds SAM host.

  11. Once you complete these steps, the SNMP Service Properties Security tab should look something like the following screenshot. Notice that we used 192.168.1.3, as that is the IP of the server where we plan to deploy SolarWinds SAM.