SNMP Monitoring

SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. It’s one of many network monitoring protocols, but SNMP is special because it’s designed to transmit messages between a central alarm master (an SNMP manager) and SNMP remotes (devices) at each network site. This allows for a more seamless communication channel between the multiple devices on a network and the monitoring tool.

SNMP monitoring helps IT admins manage their servers and other network hardware such as modems, routers, access points, switches, and additional devices connected to the network. With a better view of these disparate devices, IT admins can obtain clear insights into key metrics like network and bandwidth usage, or they can track uptime and traffic levels to optimize performance.

The SNMP architecture is based on a client-server model. In the case of network monitoring, the server is the monitor responsible for aggregating and analyzing information from clients on a network. The clients are the devices or device components, including switches, routers, and computers, connected to the network and monitored by the server.

Some key concepts of the SNMP monitoring process are:

1. Object identifiers (OIDs) – An OID is an address used to identify a device and its status. It can be thought of an IP address for a device’s value. However, because OIDs are just a bunch of numbers separated by seemingly random dots, it can be hard for IT admins to decipher what device they’re viewing when they monitor large-scale networks.
2. Management information bases (MIBs) – Admins use MIBs to translate numerical OIDs into text-based OIDs.
3. SNMP traps – Traps are unsolicited messages sent from an agent to a management station when an important event is detected.
4. SNMP polling – Polling is when a network managed station asks devices for status updates during regularly scheduled intervals.

SNMP can help you manage your network in a very simple yet effective manner. Because network monitoring requires admins to keep track of many network devices, SMNP can help streamline the process.

For one, SNMP helps IT admins collect information about how much bandwidth is being used by different devices on a network. Likewise, SNMP can help IT admins aggregate error reports and organize them into a log. This allows admins to optimize troubleshooting efforts and more quickly identify network performance trends or issues. With these improved insights, admins can configure automatic email or text alerts notifying managers of urgent issues—for instance, when their networks’ servers are low on disk space or when a specific device isn’t performing well.

There are two primary SNMP monitoring methods:

1. Active monitoring – For active SNMP monitoring, admins inject test packets into their networks or send packets to servers and applications to create artificial network traffic. This allows admins to obtain meaningful measurements of how devices and equipment are faring on a network during cases of poor performance or after a critical incident.
2. Passive monitoring – In the case of passive monitoring, devices are polled periodically so management information base data can be extracted during regularly scheduled intervals. This allows IT teams to better assess network performance and health from a more general standpoint.

SNMP is important because it’s a granular, fast, and accurate way for organizations to understand what’s happening in their networks. As the industry standard protocol in network monitoring, SNMP is one of the best ways for IT admins to track network traffic, and one of the few ways to understand data transmission on such a detailed level. Using SNMP monitoring, admins can view actual packet information to gain a real-time overview of evolving traffic patterns as well as in-depth insights into specific bottlenecks.

SNMP management software can help users better monitor critical performance metrics of network devices, such as server CPU and memory use. When usage exceeds normal thresholds, the software can send alerts so an IT admin can help the network avoid potential issues or downtime. Another key component of an SNMP management tool is to perform active polling. This involves retrieving management information base variables from devices to determine faulty behavior or connection problems.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is a robust monitoring software built with many different SNMP management software modules. NPM features an SNMP Scanner to help IT admins monitor their network devices. The scanner can perform SNMP sweep and discovery to collect detailed information from even the most complex, large-scale networks.

In addition, NPM has an SNMP trap receiver monitoring tool so IT admins can receive immediate notifications of traps and events for quicker time-to-resolution during critical incidents. The trap receiver software listens for SNMP traps generated by the devices on the monitored network. When an event occurs, the tool logs trap details along with other helpful details like time, IP address, hostname, trap type, and more. These details can be correlated and analyzed to achieve a more optimized network security and performance practice.

The network monitoring tools in NPM are designed to help IT pros easily monitor network fault, availability, and performance of network devices.  Users can poll the MIBs on their network devices to obtain valuable performance metrics, which can then be displayed via customizable dashboards and charts. This level of autonomy over visibility allows IT admins to optimize networks so their organizations can deliver business-critical applications and services to their end users.

There are many different tools and features built into SolarWinds NPM software, including several exclusive to SolarWinds. One of the most popular features is the NetPath^™ network path analysis tool, which uses advanced connectivity tracing to help IT admins detect network paths from a source server to a destination service. This affords users better visibility into critical network paths, regardless of whether your infrastructure is built on the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment. Additionally, NetPath is built to help IT teams discover outages before users do and helps them see the exact location of the issue along a given network path.

NPM also includes the PerfStack^™ feature, which can help IT teams accelerate their root cause analysis practices in their network monitoring protocol. PerfStack comes with dashboards to help users troubleshoot projects and visually correlate historical time series data in a single interface. This can help IT teams analyze notable incidents, generate custom reports, optimize root cause analysis, and make data-driven decisions on infrastructure changes.

• SNMP Trap Receiver Monitoring
• SNMP Scanner
• Network Usage Monitor
• Network Device Scanner
• Network Availability Monitoring
• Network Uptime Monitoring
• Network Security Monitoring Software