When using a third party network monitoring program (like Solarwinds Orion) you need to enable SNMP on your ESXi hosts. Setting up SNMP is pretty simple to do using vicfg-snmp on the VMware Management Assistant (vMA).
If the host is set up in FastPass, set the target ESXi.
$ vifptarget -s <Name/IP of ESXi host>
If the host is not set up in FastPass then –server, –username, and –password options can be used with vicfg-snmp.
To view the current SNMP configuration run.
$ vicfg-snmp -s
Current SNMP agent settings:
Enabled : 0
UDP port : 161
Communities :
Notification targets :
SNMP is not enabled and no community is set.
To set the community string:
$ vicfg-snmp -c <Community String>
Then enable SNMP
$ vicfg-snmp -E
The ESXi server will now respond to SNMP polling.
$ vicfg-snmp -s
Current SNMP agent settings:
Enabled : 1
UDP port : 161
