SNMP – Overview and Basic Concepts

Simple Network Management Protocol or SNMP is an Internet Standard Protocol for managing tools on IP networks. Devices that generally support SNMP comprise of switches, routers, servers, printers, workstations and modem racks. SNMP is mostly used in network management systems to scrutinize network-connected devices for states that call for administrative consideration. SNMP is a part of the IPS (Internet Protocol Suite) as classified by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Simple Network Management Protocol provides managing data in the form of variables on the controlled systems, which explain the system configuration.

SNMP standards:

Introduced in the 80s, the original edition of SNMP, SNMPv1, lack some crucial functionality & only worked with IP or TCP networks. An enhanced version for SNMP, SNMPv2 was introduced in 1992. Even though Simple Network Management Protocol had many security issues, several networks remained on the SNMPv1whilst others implemented SNMPv2. Recently, the SNMPv3 version was introduced to address those issues with SNMPv1 & SNMPv2 and allowed managers to move to one regular SNMP standard.

Overview & basic concepts of SNMP:

In general SNMP uses, one or more administrative computer systems, known as managers, have the responsibility of monitoring or controlling a group of devices or hosts on a computer network. All managed systems execute a software module called an agent which provides information using SNMP to the manager. SNMP agents assign management data on the controlled systems as variables. Also, the protocol allows active management responsibilities, such as revising & employing a new configuration via remote adjustment of these variables. The variables available via SNMP are prearranged in ranking. These ranking, and other meta data are included in MIBs (Management Information Bases).

An SNMP-controlled network comprises of three crucial elements:

• Managed device
• Agent software that runs on controlled devices
• NMS or Network management station application that runs on the manager

MIMIC SNMP simulator:

 

MIMIC SNMP Simulator creates a network of up to 100,000 SNMP-manageable devices. You can create any SNMP-based device with any number of public or private MIBs to run a large variety of device configurations with your SNMP management application. It lets you generate thousands of traps to simulate disaster scenarios.

Follow Gambit Communications on:-
 

Read More

Network Monitoring – An Overview

Network monitoring is needed in a system that persistently scrutinizes a computer network for sluggish or weakening components. It informs the network administrator via SMS or email in case of outages. It’s a part of network management.

Whilst an intrusion-detection system scrutinizes a network for dangers from the exterior, a network monitoring system scrutinizes the network for issues sourced by overloaded or crashed servers. For instance, to know the status of a web server, monitoring software might sporadically send an HTTP request to obtain a page. For e-mail servers, a text message might be sent via SMTP & recovered by POP3 or IMAP.

Generally measured standards are response time, accessibility & uptime, though both reliability and consistency measures are beginning to obtain popularity. The extensive incorporation of WAN optimization tools is having negative effects on most of the network monitoring devices – particularly when it is about observing precise end-to-end response time since they restrict round trip visibility.

Internet server monitoring

Monitoring an internet server denotes that the owner of the server always notified if one or more of services go down. Server monitor could be internal, for example, web server application verifies its status and informs the proprietor if some services go down, and external, i.e. some web server monitoring firms verify the service status with certain regularity. Server monitoring can cover a test of system measures, such as memory usage, CPU usage, disk space and network performance. Also, it can comprise application monitoring, such as verifying the procedures of programs such as Nginx, Postgres, Apache, MySQL and others.

External monitoring is more dependable, as it keeps working when the server totally goes down. Also, manyserver monitoring tools have performance benchmarking, alerting abilities & the capability to connect certain entrances with automatic server responsibilities such as performing a backup.

Follow Gambit Communications on:-
 

Read More