Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)

➢ Several network management standards have been devised during the last few

decades.

➢ The most important one is Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), used by

the Internet.

➢ SNMP is a framework for managing devices in an internet using the TCP/IP protocol

suite.

➢ It provides a set of fundamental operations for monitoring and maintaining an

internet.

➢ SNMP uses the concept of manager and agent.

➢ That is, a manager, usually a host, controls and monitors a set of agents, usually

routers or servers (see Figure 27.2).

➢ SNMP is an application-level protocol in which a few manager stations control a set

of agents.

➢ The protocol is designed at the application level so that it can monitor devices made

by different manufacturers and installed on different physical networks.

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 ➢ In other words, SNMP frees management tasks from both the physical characteristics

of the managed devices and the underlying networking technology.

➢ It can be used in a heterogeneous internet made of different LANs and WANs

connected by routers made by different manufacturers.

Managers and Agents

➢ A management station, called a manager, is a host that runs the SNMP client

program.

➢ A managed station, called an agent, is a router (or a host) that runs the SNMP server

program.

➢ Management is achieved through simple interaction between a manager and an

agent.

➢ The agent keeps performance information in a database.

➢ The manager has access to the values in the database.

➢ For example, a router can store in appropriate variables the number of packets

received and forwarded.

➢ The manager can fetch and compare the values of these two variables to see if the

router is congested or not.

➢ The manager can also make the router perform certain actions.

➢ For example, a router periodically checks the value of a reboot counter to see when

it should reboot itself.

➢ It reboots itself, for example, if the value of the counter is 0.

➢ The manager can use this feature to reboot the agent remotely at any time.

➢ It simply sends a packet to force a 0 value in the counter.

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 ➢ Agents can also contribute to the management process.

➢ The server program running on the agent can check the environment and, if it notices

something unusual, it can send a warning message (called a Trap) to the manager.

➢ In other words, management with SNMP is based on three basic ideas:

1. A manager checks an agent by requesting information that reflects the behavior

of the agent.

2. A manager forces an agent to perform a task by resetting values in the agent

database.

3. An agent contributes to the management process by warning the manager of an

unusual situation.

Management Components

➢ To do management tasks, SNMP uses two other protocols: Structure of Management

Information (SMI) and Management Information Base (MIB).

➢ In other words, management on the Internet is done through the cooperation of

three protocols: SNMP, SMI, and MIB, as shown in Figure 27.3.

Role of SNMP

➢ SNMP has some very specific roles in network management.

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 ➢ It defines the format of the packet to be sent from a manager to an agent and vice

versa.

➢ It also interprets the result and creates statistics (often with the help of other

management software).

➢ The packets exchanged contain the object (variable) names and their status (values).

➢ SNMP is responsible for reading and changing these values.

Role of SMI

➢ To use SNMP, we need rules for naming objects.

➢ This is particularly important because the objects in SNMP form a hierarchical

structure (an object may have a parent object and some child objects).

➢ Part of a name can be inherited from the parent.

➢ We also need rules to define the types of objects.

➢ What types of objects are handled by SNMP? Can SNMP handle simple types or

structured types? How many simple types are available? What are the sizes of these

types? What is the range of these types? In addition, how are each of these types

encoded?

➢ We need these universal rules because we do not know the architecture of the

computers that send, receive, or store these values.

➢ The sender may be a powerful computer in which an integer is stored as 8-byte data;

the receiver may be a small computer that stores an integer as 4-byte data.

➢ SMI is a protocol that defines these rules.

➢ However, we must understand that SMI only defines the rules; it does not define

how many objects are managed in an entity or which object uses which type.

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 ➢ SMI is a collection of general rules to name objects and to list their types.

➢ The association of an object with the type is not done by SMI.

Role of MIB

➢ We hope it is clear that we need another protocol.

➢ For each entity to be managed, this protocol must define the number of objects,

name them according to the rules defined by SMI, and associate a type to each

named object.

➢ This protocol is MIB. MIB creates a set of objects defined for each entity in a manner

similar to that of a database (mostly metadata in a database, names and types

without values).

An Analogy

➢ Before discussing each of these protocols in more detail, let us give an analogy.

➢ The three network management components are similar to what we need when we

write a program in a computer language to solve a problem.

➢ Figure 27.4 shows the analogy.

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 Syntax: SMI

➢ Before we write a program, the syntax of the language (such as C or Java) must be

predefined.

➢ The language also defines the structure of variables (simple, structured, pointer, and

so on) and how the variables must be named.

➢ For example, a variable name must be 1 to n characters in length and start with a

letter followed by alphanumeric characters.

➢ The language also defines the type of data to be used (integer, real, character, etc.).

➢ In programming, the rules are defined by the syntax of the language. In network

management, the rules are defined by SMI.

Object Declaration and Definition: MIB

➢ Most computer languages require that objects be declared and defined in each

specific program.

➢ Declaration and definition create objects using predefined types and allocate

memory location for them.

➢ For example, if a program has two variables (an integer named counter and an array

named grades of type char), they must be declared at the beginning of the program:

➢ MIB does this task in network management.

➢ MIB names each object and defines the type of the objects.

➢ Because the type is defined by SMI, SNMP knows the range and size.

Program Coding: SNMP

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 ➢ After declaration in programming, the program needs to write statements to store

values in the variables and change them if needed.

➢ SNMP does this task in network management.

➢ SNMP stores, changes, and interprets the values of objects already declared by MIB

according to the rules defined by SMI

An Overview

➢ A manager station (SNMP client) wants to send a message to an agent station (SNMP

server) to find the number of UDP user datagrams received by the agent.

➢ Figure 27.5 shows an overview of steps involved.

➢ MIB is responsible for finding the object that holds the number of UDP user

datagrams received. SMI, with the help of another embedded protocol, is

responsible for encoding the name of the object.

➢ SNMP is responsible for creating a message, called a GetRequest message, and

encapsulating the encoded message.

➢ Of course, things are more complicated than this simple overview, but we first need

more details of each protocol.

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 ➢

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