Subject: Advanced Network Technologies

Topic: Network Management and Control

Difficulty: Medium

SNMP Agents SNMP agents do the bulk of the work. They are responsible for gathering information about the local system and storing them in a format that can be queried.updating a database called the "management information base", or MIB.

The MIB is a hierarchical, pre-defined structure that stores information that can be queried or set. This is available to well-formed SNMP requests originating from a host that has authenticated with the correct credentials (an SNMP manager).

The agent computer configures which managers should have access to its information. It can also act as an intermediary to report information on devices it can connect to that are not configured for SNMP traffic. This provides a lot of flexibility in getting your components online and SNMP accessible.

SNMP agents respond to most of the commands defined by the protocol. These include GetRequest, GetNextRequest, GetBulkRequest, SetRequest and InformRequest. In addition, an agent is designed to send Trap messages.