SNMP Monitoring Guidelines

Introduction

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an application protocol offering network management services in the Internet Protocol suite. SNMP is defined in several RFCs published beginning in 1990. During the last few years SNMP has been adopted by numerous vendors of network equipment as a main or secondary management interface.

SNMP defines a client/server relationship. The client program (called the network manager) makes virtual connections to a server program (called the SNMP agent) executing on a remote network device. The data base controlled by the SNMP agent is referred to as the SNMP Management Information Base (MIB), and is a standard set of statistical and control values. SNMP additionally allows the extension of these standard values with values specific to a particular agent through the use of private MIBs.
Directives, issued by the network manager client to an SNMP agent, consist of the identifiers of SNMP variables (referred to as MIB object identifiers or MIB variables) along with instructions to either get the value for the identifier, or set the identifier to a new value.

Through the use of private MIB variables, SNMP agents can be tailored for a myriad of specific devices, such as network bridges, gateways, and routers. The definitions of MIB variables supported by a particular agent are incorporated in descriptor files, written in Abstract Syntax Notation (ASN.1) format, made available to network management client programs so that they can become aware of these MIB variables and their usage.

ActiveXperts Network Monitor and SNMP

ActiveXperts Network Monitor supports the following SNMP features:

SNMP Get - Query workstations, servers and devices, and match the results;
SNMP Traps - Send SNMP traps to (remote) SNMP management stations.

SNMP Agent

To use SNMP features with ActiveXperts Network Monitor, the SNMP Service must be installed, configured and running on the server where the ActiveXperts Network Monitor service is running.

To install the SNMP Service on a Windows XP/2000/2003 platform, you must do the following:

Open the Control Panel, choose 'Add/Remove Programs' and select the 'Add/Remove Windows Components' icon from the left-pane;
Select 'Management and Monitoring Tools' and click on 'Details';
Select 'Simple Network Management Protocol' and click 'OK';
Click 'Next'; it will now install the SNMP Agent software.

After installation, you must configure the SNMP Service, otherwise it won't work:

Open the 'Services' applet from the 'administrative Tools' group in the 'Start' menu;
Select 'SNMP Service' and select 'Properties' from the context menu (right mouse-button);
In the 'Accepted Community Names' list, add a new community, for instance: 'Public' (READ_ONLY);
Enable 'Accept SNMP Packets from any host', or add all hosts that you want to allow. IMPORTANT: Do NOT use localhost in the list of accepted hosts, it will not work!!
Restart the SNMP Service.

Testing and Troubleshooting

ActiveXperts Network Monitor uses ActiveSocket for all its SNMP Get and Trap operations. ActiveSocket is ActiveXperts' commercial Networking Toolkit. This Toolkit ships with a comprehensive Demo application (called 'ActiveSocket Demo Application').

To test and troubleshoot SNMP, you can this ActiveSocket Demo Application. Click on the link below to download:

ActiveSocket Demo Application (140 KB)