Question

SNMP in Windows 2008 R2

Answer 1

SNMP Windows Server 2008

Although an SNMP community configuration is very simple, when we talk about monitoring systems we are entering a "proactive" environment and, as far as possible, automated. At least that would be the idea, regardless of the amount of equipment (no matter physical or virtual) that we manage.

• We will start by creating the Group Policy object or GPO and then configure it with our community parameters and, finally, link it to the container or containers of servers (Organizational Units).

• In a Domain Controller, within the administrative tools menu, we have the Group Policy Management console. When we open the console we can see a hierarchical structure that begins with the Forest, to continue with the domains and then the containers that hang from each domain.

• There is a container called Group Policy Objects . We will click on it and we will see all our Group Policy objects. We will click on the container itself and select "NEW".

• We observe that the window of creation of a new GPO to which we must assign a name. In our case we will call it "SNMP Configuration Servers".

• The SNMP configurations are at the team level. GPOs are divided between Team configurations and User settings. As we know that this GPO will only apply configurations at the computer level, we can optimize the GPO application process by disabling the user configuration of the GPO object in this case.

• To do this, we click with the second button on the GPO object that we have just configured and, under the option GPO status, we mark User Configuration DISABLED .

• Now we must configure the SNMP options of the GPO object . We click with the second button on the GPO object that we just created and select "EDIT". The configuration panel of the GPO object will open. Within the configuration panel open: Computer Configuration \ Policies \ Administrative Templates \ Network \ SNMP .

• As we can see we have three configuration options: Communities, Administrators and Catch .

• We click on "COMMUNITIES" , click on "EDIT" and add our community. Most monitoring systems use the default community name " Public " but it is probably not a good idea for security reasons. In our example we have put " CNL-SNMP" .

• If we click on "VALUE" next we can configure the administrators.

• We can enter either the name or the IP address of the monitoring system.

And finally we will configure the Captures for public communities. Here we configure the same as in the previous window since it deals with SNMP traps sent by the host (our Windows system) to our SNMP manager, which is none other than the monitoring system.

We close the configuration window of the GPO object and link the GPO object to the Organizational Units where we have our servers that we want to monitor using the SNMP protocol.

With this we will have our SNMP configured in our Windows 2008 Server R2.

Ricardo Quagliano

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