Sunday, 5 May 2013

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The SNMP protocol and Network Management

By Klairi Tsatoura


SNMP is actually among the most common supervision protocols and this is for good reason. However what are other useful protocol alternatives, and exactly why opt for SNMP? Are there any cases where some other protocols really should be applied or even are being currently used? These are typically but important questions that many persons are asking every so often. Because of this I'm going to make an effort to help answer all of them at this point, based on my very own 19 years experience in Element, Network and Service Management. Note that this article ought to be used simply as food for thought when researching today's protocol possible choices, which are SNMP, CLI, Netconf and also Netflow/IPFIX.

IETF created SNMP in the 1980s and so it became a very popular network management protocol. Through the early 21st century it has become very clear the fact that despite that was originally intended, SNMP was not utilized for setting up network devices, on the contrary it appeared to be largely being utilized for the purpose of network monitoring, i.e. Fault and Performance Management.

Within 2002, the Internet Architecture Board and people in IETF's network management circle got together with network operators to talk about the matter. The results from this meeting are really recorded inside RFC 3535. It appears service providers had been largely employing proprietary Command Line Interfaces (CLI) to set up their devices. CLI contained a variety of features which the operators appreciated, like the indisputable fact that it seemed to be text-based, compared to the BER-encoded SNMP. Note also that many equipment manufacturers wouldn't provide the option to wholly setup their very own products via SNMP.

Simply as operators mostly liked to create scripts to help configure their particular network nodes, they realized that CLI was short on various ways. They were also surprised by the unknown dynamics in the result. The content and format of output was vulnerable to changes in ways unforeseen. At the same time, Juniper Networks came up with an XML-like management technique. This technique has been sent to the IETF and later given to a wider circle. Collectively, these incidents led IETF towards introduction of NetConf protocol which is anticipated to be much better in-line considering the demands of network operators and devices manufacturers.

With respect to Performance Management on routers/switches for IP, CISCO before long realized that a more compact protocol compared to SNMP was required to scale much better for performance collection on IP networks. Netflow initially introduced by CISCO has become a standard today (named IPfix) that has been implemented by many routers/switches Manufacturers.




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