Credentials Best Practices

• Use credential management to specify how to secure your device communications. 

• Use Credentials Configurations to determine the credentials that need to be used for communication with the devices. 

• Manage credentials on a network or global basis, not per device . This allows you to make changes to a single credential, rather than make changes to each of many individual devices.  

• If your Device Server and its devices are within a secured private network, then using unsecured protocols such as Telnet, FTP, and SNMP provides better overall performance and management ease, as well as better device coverage. 

• If your Device Server and its devices are not within a single secured private network, then use credential management to disable non-secure protocols, and allow only secure protocols, such as SSH and SCP.

  When using SNMP Communications

• Enabling SNMP communications provides the best overall quality of device information, with the greatest span of device coverage. The cost is a lower network security on traffic between the Device Servers and the monitored devices.  

• Disabling SNMP communications gives you improved network security (by disabling non-secure SNMP traffic). The cost is having less device-specific information available, from a fewer number of device types. Information that is lost could include connection information, memory availability, and system information.