What is SNMP ?

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a standard protocol used to communicate management information between the network management stations (NMS) and the agents (ex. routers, switches, network devices) in the network elements.

Key components of SNMP: managed devices, agents, and network-management systems (NMSs).

A managed device is a network node that contains an SNMP agent and that resides on a managed network.

An agent is a network management software module that resides in a managed device.

An NMS executes applications that monitor and control managed devices.

Versions of SNMP: SNMP v1, SNMP v2 and SNMP v3.

Both versions 1 and 2 have a number of features in common, but SNMPv2 offers enhancements, such as additional protocol operations.

SNMP version 3 (SNMPv3) adds security and remote configuration capabilities to the previous versions.

This figure shows the basic operation of simple network management protocol (SNMP).