Introducing SNMP

SNMP is an industry standard and all major hardware and software vendors support it. All commonly used operating systems can provide information using SNMP. Microsoft offers SNMP for its Windows platform. UNIX systems have SNMP daemons that receive requests from other machines.

SNMP also offers a standardized, hierarchical way to group and access information, called Management Information Base (MIB), which defines the attributes that can be accessed and the data types associated with them. This allows the creation of attributes that all devices should use to provide information on standard parameters, such as network configuration, usage, and potential threats. It also allows custom parameters to be created so that they do not interfere with other devices' data.

Most operating systems come with various utilities that allow communication with other devices over SNMP. These utilities can be used to verify which attributes are available on specific devices and what their values...