SNMP and Windows services/event log errors

Hello everyone,

I'm a recent college hire and I've been given some tasks that require me to learn the Zenoss software. I don't remember having much hands on experience with SNMP and a class I took working with VMWare ESXi 6 is the most experience I have working with monitoring software. I work remotely and there really isn't anyone who has extensive knowledge on the web interface, so I'm pretty much learning the software on my own.

We have a group of servers that we don't own, but still want to monitor. I've added a group of windows 2012 cloud servers and I'm having a few issues. When I go to the "Jobs" section, the status of all the devices I've added are listed as failure even though I can see the devices and ping them within the web interface (though the ping doesn't seem to finish). I don't know if that's a big issue or not. Also on all the servers I've added, I receive "SNMP agent down - no response received" and "Could not read Windows event log (NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED) / (NT_STATUS_IO_TIMEOUT)" errors. I believe I receive the SNMP errors because the SNMP service is not configured correctly on the servers, but I don't have admin (domain or local) access to make those changes. I did a litte reading and came across WMI and WinRM as alternative monitoring methods. Do either of those methods have a way where I can use a non admininistrative account to pull data from those servers If someone could briefly explain to me what I am doing wrong, the process of configuring monitoring for cloud servers (such as Windows Services that I may need to add), or post a few items a Zenoss beginner should read over I would greatly appreciate it. I believe I'm using version 4.2.4

Thanks