I think SNMP is great for network diagnostics although for providing incidents for event management and autonomic computing it's not helpful. It makes sense to have a protocol that can move easily across clouds ( EC2, Google App Engine, Flexiscale, ... ) , IT departments and mobile  networks.

A lot of IT Systems Management guys today have the challenge of tying all of the events together from different departments for event management and autonomics. Imagine having to tie events not just from three or four world wide distributed data centers but also from applications hosted in a cloud that can be anywhere. Constantly updating SNMP changes and a variatry of different protocols for each vendor who took just enough time to implement monitoring. Playing catch up, for event management and autonomics, may not be possible when leveraging the scalability the cloud has to offer.

Some vendors think it may be a little to early to think about standards or are just assuming IT Systems Management guys with keep the "same old same old" in the cloud with SNMP and other department specific diagnostic protocols. Which may just be the case since it's been that way forever, although I believe this is the perfect opportunity to change and improve how we identify problems wherever
our applications in the cloud are running.

We all know what security issues snmp brings to the table if someone sends 10,000 requests to a network device in a Denial of Service Attack the SNMP reciever today cannot process all the snmp output and the 10,001 request enters unseen into the network. We are looking for qualified events for event management and autonomics from each group ( transaction, web, app, database and network ). Sure JMX, SNMP, SOAP, etc still help for diagnosics of the different groups but when tying all the events together and making changes I think a standard protocol will help.

I am just a monitoring person who is interested to help make positive change to get applications into the cloud and more manageable when more and more business applications get here, since these tasks will be on the IT management guys and my plate anyways.

Hope this helps.

JM