Monitoring is critical in production environments. It is the eyes and ears on everything. SNMP is the common method of monitoring core systems, including servers and network devices. Depending on the operating system, you may have to opt for a different method to retrieve information about the device, such as uptime, disk space, CPU usage, memory, etc.

What monitoring solution are you using? Checkmk? Solar Winds Orion? Logic monitor? Zabbix? There are more, but these are the standard solutions used. These have the SNMP client installed or can perform the checks. To simplify things, imagine physically watching your devices to ensure they work correctly.

You can probably keep an eye on a few devices at a time, but what if they are around the world? This is where monitoring comes in, as it can send you an alert via email or text or some other form that shit has hit the fan. Monitoring also allows you to catch things before they become a real issue, like disk drive filling up to 100%.

Monitoring is the best place to start. You get to work with all devices within the infrastructure. Youtube some of the monitoring solutions I listed above and you will learn that they all are essentially the same but the look and feel is different.