| INFORMATION |
| Published : |
Dec 29, 2009 |
| Length : |
17 |
| Type : |
White Paper |
|
| |
|
|
|
| Overview : |
|
The goal of this Essentials Series has been to illustrate why effective
monitoring and management is necessary for a healthy network. That need is the case
irrespective of the size of your network. Whether you're a small business with a few
devices or a large enterprise with many thousands, not having this vision prevents you
from actually understanding what's going on inside your network. |
|
 |
 |
|
|
| View All Items By This Company |
| Browse Related Categories : |
|
Bandwidth Management
,
Network Architecture
,
Network Management
,
Network Performance Management
,
Network Provisioning
,
Network Security
,
Small Business Networks
,
TCP/IP Protocol
,
Traffic Management
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
That information is descriptive of the individual device you've logged into, but stops there.
Today's network devices natively include all the necessary capabilities to gather and report on their network traffic statistics. You can today request this information from each device and manually build a picture of how your network is operating. However, the complexity of doing so rises dramatically as your network's count of interconnected devices goes much past one.
To combat these complexities, the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) was ratified in the early 1990s. This protocol enables a request-response framework between individual devices and a central Network Management Solution (NMS). Individual devices
can be polled for their information through a GET request by the NMS. Device information
is stored and can be addressed via its globally-unique Management Information Base (MIB)
Object Identifier (OID). An OID's long string of digits represents the "address" for the unit of information being stored on that device. Information being stored can relate to network statistics, details about that device's configuration, performance and throughput metrics, or really any information that the device's manufacturer has enabled.
This part of SNMP's poll-based nature means that information must be requested if it is to be sent back to the NMS. For this reason, SNMP also has a unidirectional alert component.
An SNMP "trap" represents a preconfigured alert from a device back to its NMS, reporting
on conditions that the NMS should know about. This setup enables SNMP clients to rapidly
notify the NMS when problems exist.
SNMP also comes in many versions, with later versions including additional and desired
features over those in the previous. SNMP v3 is today's version commonly used by most
environments because it adds a suite of critical security features that protect its data in transit and authenticates servers prior to communication. This encryption ensures that the clear text data transfers of earlier versions are protected from prying eyes, while servers must prove their identity before they're communicated with.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
