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...