As this is a short article I cannot touch upon everything there is to say about SNMP as it is a broad subject. However it is something you almost certainly will touch upon. I prefer agent based monitoring whenever possible, but there are devices which do not run a SCOM agent of course, so you would need another way of monitoring them. In most cases network attached devices are able to talk SNMP. In many cases you can connect to them with an SNMP read string and check if they are up. I have touched upon this already in trick 30 for network devices and trick 31 server hardware. However there is a lot more. For instance storage, tape libraries, UPS, operating systems, server hardware and many more.
So if you want to get cracking with this I would suggest first taking a look at a few posts in the community about the subject to get up to speed.
Pete Zerger SNMP Series:
http://systemcentercentral.com/BlogDetails/tabid/143/indexid/13020/Default.aspx
Francois Dufour on SNMP trap monitoring:
http://blogcastrepository.com/blogs/francoisd/archive/2009/11/19/scom-2007-snmp-trap-based-detection-monitor.aspx
SNMP probe based monitors David Allen
http://www.aquilaweb.com/blog/index.php?itemid=54
SNMP monitors and numeric data workaround by Raphael Burri
http://rburri.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/snmp-based-monitors-and-numeric-expressions-workaround/
Watch Kristopher Bash as he builds the xSNMP mp for Cisco:
http://operatingquadrant.com/2009/09/10/scom-advanced-snmp-monitoring-part-i-discovering-cisco-devices-and-hosted-classes/
I am sure these will bring you up to speed. Happy monitoring!
