SNMP Management

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note_glossary-term

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a UDP-based network protocol, widely used to monitor and control network-attached devices, services and applications.

SNMP is defined in a series of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, covering not only the protocol itself, but also the Management Information Base (MIB) specification language (SMI and its successor SMIv2), a series of standard MIB definitions, and even the architecture of agent implementations.

SNMP overview and basic concepts are introduced in SNMP Basics section.

In AggreGate Network Manager SNMP support is provided by Network Host device driver. The driver provides:

SNMP read and write operations
SNMP-compliant device monitoring by:
opolling (periodical reading of full of partial management information available via SNMP)
oreceiving and processing SNMP traps
managing standard and custom SNMP devices
caching management information on the server
storing management information in database
managing monitoring options:
osynchronization periods
opolling strategies: all OIDs, OIDs recognized by MIB directory, or the important ones only
orunning automatic actions in response to SNMP traps
MIB management, including:
oa set of standard MIBs
otools for adding and configuring usage of custom MIBs

SNMP is used in network discovery:

to find seed routers and get network topology information
to discover SNMP-compliant devices
to get some of their properties

Various practical aspects and details of SNMP utilization in AggreGate Network Manager are covered in Using SNMP section.