ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses what SNMP is, how it is used, and the challenges facing network management and security professionals regarding its use. SNMP is used to monitor network and computer devices around the globe. Simply stated, network managers use SNMP to communicate management information, both status and configuration, between the network management station and the SNMP agents in the network devices. Through SNMP, the network manager can monitor the status of the various network elements, make appropriate configuration changes, and respond to alerts received from the network elements. SNMP can retrieve the configuration information for a given network element in addition to device errors or alerts. Error conditions will vary from one SNMP agent to another but would include network interface failures, system failures and disk space warnings. SNMP uses traps to send messages from the agent running on the monitored system to the monitoring station, which are then used to control the polling.
