SNMP

SNMP is a standardized protocol used to collect and manage devices. Although the standard allows you to use SNMP for device management, in my experience, most network administrators prefer to keep SNMP as an information collection mechanism only. Since SNMP operates on UDP that is connectionless and considering the relatively weak security mechanism in versions 1 and 2, making device changes via SNMP tend to make network operators a bit uneasy. SNMP Version 3 has added cryptographic security and new concepts and terminologies to the protocol, but the way it's adapted varies among network device vendors.

SNMP is widely used in network monitoring and has been around since 1988 and was part of RFC 1065. The operations are straightforward with the network manager sending GET and SET requests toward the device and the device with the SNMP agent responding with the information per request. The most widely adapted standard is SNMPv2c, which is defined in RFC 1901 - RFC 1908. It uses a simple...