SNMP - the Simple Network Management Protocol

When it comes to network management protocols, the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is probably one of the best-known. It is commonly used in networks and several applications internally support SNMP for monitoring purposes.

In this section, we will only provide a short overview of SNMP because its full workings are beyond the scope of this book.

The Management Information Base

SNMP stores information in a virtual database called a Management Information Base (MIB). The database is hierarchical (tree-structured) and entries are addressed through object identifiers (OID).

Generally, an organization that has an SNMP agent will publish a MIB-Module for their product and this is used on the management station to map the OIDs to human readable equivalents and perform some basic sanity checks on the format of data returned.

SNMPv1

SNMPv1 is the original SNMP protocol defined in the late 1980s. One of the main design goals for SNMP was to keep it...