I had the worst day trying to troubleshoot slow internet connection speeds with Time Warner today. Without SNMP interfaces on the 3Com OfficeConnect VPN Firewalls we use I couldn’t get a handle on where the problem was occurring. All I knew is that we didn’t have a lot of irregular traffic on any ports, the VPN stayed up (barely) and I had external URL and IP ping times as high as 2500 ms.
We’re going to be putting an SNMP compliant firewall/router at our core. Probably a 3Com Tipping Point. That will let me use PRTG Traffic Grapher to look at our bandwidth by interface in real time. Monitoring without SNMP sucks.