What is SNMP?

If you are responsible for managing network equipment, SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) provides a standard way to monitor and administer devices.

Many routers, switches, servers, printers, and other network devices include an SNMP agent. A typical SNMP configuration consists of:

Management Station > SNMP > Network Device

The management station retrieves information from the SNMP agent using standard object identifiers (OIDs).

Typical information includes:

• Network interfaces
• Traffic counters
• System uptime
• Device name
• Memory usage

SNMP version 1 and version 2 commonly use community strings to control read and write access.

Because SNMP is widely supported, a single management application can monitor equipment from multiple vendors.