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The SNMP protocol is an application layer protocol and is based on UDP. We know that there has SNMP protocol on the router, so is there a switch and a PC? What is the specific role of it?
aircraft
Posted 2019-05-24T10:58:52.263
Reputation: 456
What's the function of SNMP protocol?
Answers
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SNMP stands for "simple network management protocol" and it is ecactly that.
SNMP is a (supposedly) simple protocol which allows a device to expose information about itself in a fairly well defined (tree like) structure - so for example a switch might expose information like number of switch ports and the amount of traffic going through each port. A UPS might expose its incoming and outgoing voltage, load, battery health and charge. A PC server might expose its disk, cpu and RAM utilization. It is also possible to extend SNMP to display arbitrary values like number of web requests a web server is currently handling.
A user or monitoring system would be able to keep track of these metrics. Ive not used it for this purpose but I believe it is also possible for a ckient to update values and communicate change to a server.
(It woud be similar to mqtt for IOT. It interfaces well with monitoring software like Nagios and Cacti)
davidgo
Posted 2019-05-24T10:58:52.263
Reputation: 49 152
Can a dedicated sever expose its power status and other device status. like tempture? – aircraft – 2019-05-24T11:49:07.060
Is it possible to manage a server or switch through SNMP? – aircraft – 2019-05-24T11:51:08.590
A deducated server can expose things like temperature (thats fairly common). Not sure what you are asking about power status - probably not in the general case because it needs power to run the snmp agent to respond. It is conceivable SNMP could be built onto a BMC (ie server management board) but im not aware if this. A lack of an SNMP response can infer a problem, but not conclusively say the power is off or system is hybernating - it could be a network or software error. – davidgo – 2019-05-24T19:23:57.713
Its probably not practical to manage a server or switch via SNMP but it is theoretically possible to hack something together to do so if the manufacturer really wanted to - although it would be inefficient and im not confident it would be secure. – davidgo – 2019-05-24T19:27:04.813