SNMP or Simple Network Management Protocol offers many advantages as a protocol for monitoring
network devices. First, it is an industry standard so it's widely supported. SNMP because it's been
around for a long time and already reports on a great many valuable metrics for monitoring health
and performance so the information is already being surfaced and can be captured. This makes
Hybrid Cloud Observability very flexible in what devices and metrics it can monitor. In discussing
SNMP monitoring whether polling or trapping you have managers and managed devices. SNMP manager
is a computer system that runs on one or more Network Management Systems to communicate with
SNMP agent implemented on network devices. The SNMP manager performs various functions such
as extracting responses from the agents, querying agents, acknowledging events from
agents, and setting variables in agents. An example of this is the SolarWinds Platform.
What are managed devices? Managed devices are what you are monitoring such as firewalls,
routers, switches, UPS, and a lot more. So let's talk more about the managed devices.
Managed devices are the crucial part of the network that generates metrics. These devices
require regular monitoring and management to ensure optimum network performance.
Within a managed device there is what we call an SNMP agent. So what is an SNMP agent? SNMP agent is a
small piece of software or program that collects management information database from different
network devices and makes them available to the SNMP manager. The key function of the SNMP agent is
to store and retrieve management information from network devices. It also signals an event and act
as a proxy from non-SNMP network devices. But where does the SNMP agent get management information?
Every SNMP agent maintains a database known as the management information database or MIB. A MIB
is a collection of information about a device organized in a tree or hierarchy, The database
includes a standard set of statistical and control values of hardware devices on a network.
The SNMP manager uses this database to extract crucial information with the help of SNMP agents.
Now let me show you a screenshot of a MIB walk. This is basically the output when you run a MIB walk
utility. MIB walk is a tool that enables you to walk the SNMP tree or essentially a MIB tree for
a target device and pulls the value for each OID in the supported MIBs. The first thing that jumps
out is a bunch of numbers for a bunch of stuff. The numbers on the left are known as system OID,
or system object identifier. Each OID has its corresponding values. As you can see some have
definitions in plain English. This system OID lets you get and display information in the web console.
They are unique numbers for a particular statistic based on a hierarchy in the MIB tree.
Think of them like coordinates. They point the agent to the exact metric being requested.
In the MIB browser you can see the numbers in parentheses at each folder level.
SNMP managers query the SNMP agent on the device using that number to get that statistic. MIB and
OID structures are standard across all SNMP enabled devices and vendors can register their
OIDs for specific metrics they want in the MIB tree for their device. MIB trees however can change and need
to be periodically updated with new OIDs. The SolarWinds Platform maintains a collection of these OIDs
and MIBs from various devices and this is known as the SolarWinds MIB database. To access the rest
of this training series log into your customer portal account at customer portal.solarwinds.com
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