ITOM Discovery and SNMP on Devices

[Blue]

Hello all,

Question, we are starting our implementation of ITOM Discovery and using SNMP scanning. The Director of the network team is stating that he wants a whole project and wants to bring additional staff either through hiring or contracts to update the SNMP string on his network devices to allow ServiceNow Discovery to work. I wanted to know everyone's experience with regard to the lift to add SNMP v3 string to all network devices that would be unique to ServiceNow Discovery only. Is it a large labor lift and requires its own individual PM and project to add an additional SNMP string to devices in mass across the enterprise? I feel it is an artificial roadblock and is not that large of lift, especially with the device management tools or batch file capability.

[NickLintgenFV]

I believe the amount of effort necessary would completely depend on the type (and implementation maturity) of any device management tools in place for your organization.

• If nothing is in place and every single device needs to be updated directly/manually, this "simple" task of adding an additional SNMP account would likely be a very large & repetitive effort.
• If device management tools are in place with active management of device configurations (and assuming the tool manages all network devices), this task may be very quick to add the account in the management tool and let it propagate to all devices.
• Your organization may be anywhere on the spectrum between those two scenarios.

It seems to me that you're on the right track... your organization's network device management capabilities need to be determined such that you can get an idea of how big of a deal it is to add an SNMP account to each device.