Simple Network Management Protocol
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is the standard network management protocol of the Internet
The network management application on the network manage-ment workstation (client) communicates with the management agents of the managed systems (servers) using SNMP
The Management Information Base (MIB) includes configura-tion parameters of and information collected by the devices
The MIB and its elements are defined in the ASN.1 language
SNMP messages can be divided into three groups:
- Get (request/response) – asks the value of MIB variable
- Set (request) – sets a variable to the desired value
- Trap – informs about an incident on the device
SNMP is run on top of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP)
The strength of SNMP is its simplicity (compares with CMIP)
The lack of hierarchy in SNMP makes it difficult to manage large networks