Developing Network Management
| SNMP.
Simple Network Management Protocol - SNMP
is a TCP/IP protocol purpose-built to serve as a communications channel
for internetwork management operating at the application layer of the IP
stack. Although SNMP can be directly operated through the command
line, it is almost always used through a management application that uses
the SNMP communications channel to monitor and control networks.
SNMP has two basic components a network management station and
agents. Agents are small software modules that reside on managed devices. They can be configured to collect specific pieces of information on device operations. Most of the information consists of totals, such as total bytes, total packets, total errors and the like. Agents can be deployed on a variety of devices.
The idea is to place agents on all network devices and manage things according to the status information sent back. SNMP is a fairly simple request/response protocol. It works by having the Network Management System periodically poll the managed devices. There are three types of polling:
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