WTH is SNMP and SNMP polling??

Hello Folks 👋,

Parth this side from BUG XS team.In this blog we are going to discuss about Simple Network Management Protocol(SNMP) and SNMP polling which is an active visibility technique.

Do a clap if you found this knowledgeable.🙌

What is Simple Network Management Protocol(SNMP)?

SNMP is used in network management for monitoring the network.It helps to gather and organize information about devices present in the network.

What does SNMP do?

1. Collects and organize device information on the Network.
2. Gather information from : Switches, Routers,Wireless Access Point, Firewalls, VPN Connectors, Cloud Providers.
3. Information can be CPU usage on device,Memory Usage, Temperature of the devices, Bandwidth usageetc.

Some of the queries to interact with SNMP are:

1. GET ( To gather specific Information)
2. SET (To change value of SNMP object)
3. trap/inform SNMP

How SNMP works?

First things first, some of the important terminologies.

1. OID’s (Object Identifier)
2. MIB (Management Information Base)
3. NMS (Network Management System)

So, a device running SNMP is called as SNMP Agent. The NMS is required in order to interact with the objects i.e the OID’s.

Now, if we want information about certain Object (OID) then we would ask NMS to search about information for specific OID. So, NMS will go to MIB to look for information for the corresponding OID and finally NMS will send relevant information to SNMP agent.

So, now we know what is SNMP , let check out what is SNMP TRAP 😈

SNMP TRAP

It is an:

1. Passive Visibility Technique
2. Asynchronous Communication
3. NMS will be notified only if event occurs

There is NMS under which there are different SNMP agents working. So, a single NMS can have multiple Agents working on it. So, in SNMP trap , a NMS will only be notified if there is a occurrence of event which matches the TRAP set by the user. In other way, all communication other than mentioned in TRAP wont notify the NMS. This Passive Visibility Technique because NMS is not asking for the event.

SNMP Polling

1. Active Visibility Technique
2. Synchronous Communication
3. NMS will do query for any event in certain interval

Here, NMS will be asking for the information for any event that occurs.The NMS will have update from agent for each event and if agent is not responding it will be marked as dead.

So, this was just an gist of SNMP and its related techniques.

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I hope you found this productive! 🙌

See you soon guys ❤