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What’s the difference between WMI and SNMP when monitoring Microsoft Windows devices?

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Auvik can pull information from a host in multiple ways, but SNMP and WMI are  the most commonly used for Windows devices. Since Windows supports both SNMP and WMI, you may be wondering which protocol is best for monitoring a Windows device. 

On Windows devices, WMI and SNMP provide Auvik with the same information Auvik with one minor difference—WMI shares additional information for Hyper-V environments. If you’re running a Microsoft virtual environment, you should monitor those hosts with WMI. Otherwise, WMI and SNMP will provide similar results.

Despite providing similar results, Auvik recommends leveraging WMI wherever possible, as it’s already enabled and running on most Microsoft servers and workstations, making it quicker and easier to configure. If that’s not the case, you can follow these steps to enable WMI on a single device or these steps to enable WMI on multiple devices through GPO.

And note, although it may be tempting to enable both SNMP and WMI to monitor a Windows host, Auvik recommends using one or the other, not both.

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