Chapter 6. NET-SNMP

We have read about Cacti in the first chapter—Cacti is a complete web-based front-end for RRDTool. It has built-in SNMP capabilities, capable of polling data from SNMP-enabled network-attached devices, and processing selected data to produce graph using the RRDTool engine. So, we must have a working knowledge on SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), otherwise it will be hard to implement and manage Cacti. In this chapter, we will understand the basic data structure of SNMP, its process, command line tools, MIB definition, and then, we will look into NET-SNMP—an application suite for SNMP and its implementation in Cacti-network monitoring tool.

What is SNMP?

SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. It is a component of the Internet Protocol Suite commonly known as TCP/IP, defined by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Developed in 1988 to provide network-device-monitoring capability for TCP/IP-based networks, SNMP was approved as an internet standard...