You can have online monitoring without putting the controls online. Online controls are profoundly dumb but these big chains like it because it means that no one onsite actually needs to know how the equipment works. I’ll take an old school mechanically controlled refrigeration rack any day over one where I need to navigate a fucking phone tree with the management company to get a setting changed.

But why would it need a password if it’s polled or dropping it’s temp read to a central monitor? Sometimes these hosts have way too many “features” for no thought out reason.

I worked at a security company and one guy called the SNMP community string its “password,” and it pissed me off. I just had to bite my tongue. They also stored a backup password in the Windows global environment, which also pissed me off.