Guidelines For Simple Network Management Protocol

Steve Francis
Steve Francis

If you’re reading this, you are probably responsible for the performance, availability and capacity of some IT infrastructure.

As you know, IT infrastructure availability matters. Why? It generates revenue and enables others to do their jobs. Your primary daily objective requires ensuring that infrastructure works, and works well.

If you want sleep, you need an alternative to staying up all night awaiting potential issues, especially if you have 1,000 servers and 100 routers to manage.

Simple Network Management Protocol provides a standard message format that devices and monitoring systems can all speak – even across different operating systems or networks.

SNMP can help you scale from monitoring one device to tens of thousands, alerting you when something is wrong, and letting you sleep when everything is okay.

In reality, SNMP is not so simple and often cannot be used for management of devices - only monitoring. The needs of IT professionals have changed quite a lot since the protocol was first designed.