SNMP Agent

An SNMP Agent enables network management features. More...

Content
	Control Interface
	Functions to communicate with the Trap Manager.
	Management Information Base (MIB) Interface
	Management Information Base (MIB) Interface.
	Configuration
	Configuration of the SNMP agent.
	Structures
	Structures of the SNMP Service.

Description

An SNMP Agent enables network management features.

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is mainly used in network management systems to monitor network-attached devices for conditions that warrant administrative attention. It is the most popular network management protocol in the TCP/IP protocol suite.

Note

The Network Component's SNMP Agent supports IPv4 connections only.

SNMP is a simple request/response protocol that communicates management information between two types of SNMP software entities: SNMP managers and SNMP agents. The following picture shows an exemplary setup:

In summary, SNMP performs the following operations:

• The GET operation receives a specific value about a managed object, such as the available hard disk space from the agent's MIB.
• The GET-NEXT operation returns the "next" value by traversing the MIB tree of managed object variables.
• The SET operation changes the value of a managed object's variable. Only variables whose object definition allows read/write access can be changed.
• The Trap operation sends a message to the Management Station when a change occurs in a managed object, and that change is important enough to send an alert message.

The SNMP Agent validates each request from a SNMP manager before responding to the request, by verifying that the manager belongs to a SNMP community with access privileges to the agent. A SNMP community is a logical relationship between a SNMP agent and one or more SNMP managers. The community has a name, and all members of a community have the same access privileges: either read-only or read-write.

The SNMP Agent in the Network Component is an optimized and compact implementation for embedded systems. Currently it implements SNMP version 1.

This documentation is separated as follows:

• Control Interface shows how to send trap messages to the Trap Manager and how to switch communities.
• Management Information Base (MIB) Interface explains how to setup MIB variables to be entered in the MIB database.
• Configuration explains the configuration options of the SNMP agent.