I was recently approached by a network-engineer, co-worker who would like to offload his minor network admin duties to a junior-level helpdesk tech. The specific location in need of management acts as an ISP for tenants on its single-site property, so there's a lot of small adjustments being made on a daily basis.

I am thinking it would be helpful to write him a winform app to manage the 32 Cisco devices, on-site. I'd like to initially provide functionality which could modify access control lists, port VLAN assignments, and bandwidth limitations per VLAN... adding more to the list as its deemed valuable.

My initial thought was to emulate a telnet session with the network device; utilizing my network-engineer's familiarity with the command-line / IOS interaction. Minimal time would be required to learn Cisco IOS conventions, myself.

Though while searching for solutions, it appears that most people favor SNMP. That, or, their specific circumstances pushed them in the direction of SNMP.

I wanted to know if I've overlooked an obvious benefit of SNMP. Should I be using SNMP? Why or why not?