SNMP And Video Surveillance?

I can count on one hand the times where I used SNMP in the field, and it typically was to monitor the status of a remote device like a power supply. There are a number of managed switches that support remote reboot commands via SNMP, and that might be helpful during troubleshooting.

I use it to monitor cameras bandwidth, switch port bandwidth, raid drive status, wireless channel usage and bandwidth, ups battery time remaining, cpu, memory and disk free stats... it's really driven by end user needs which vary greatly job to job. Larger clients get the most use (1000 plus cameras) because they have so many things to manage-- it is a valuable tool to understand how the entire system is operating.

We've used SNMP to monitor various parameters of our systems for years. Typically, SNMP is used by our systems to trigger an email alert of a system problem via an Exchange server, which we've had since 2006.

I like the video. What Prof Messer missed is that some variables in SNMP are writeable as well as readable. So you can use SNMP to change the config of a system. Some passwords are R/O and some are R/W. Clearly there's a bigger security exposure when the password permits writing. The default (historic favorite) passwords are "public" and "private." It is a network best practice to change all factory default passwords. Our favorite is for SNMP to be turned off as the factory default and then users that want to use it will turn it on -- and set unique passwords when they do.

We do not permit any SNMP access from outside our LAN. That takes the edge off the need for SNMPv3. Still, we are converting all our equipment to v3 as time permits.

I used to use Nagios to monitor all IP Devices in a very large system.  It was the Open Source free version and required in depth administration.