Organization (Essential SNMP)

0.2. Organization

Chapter 1, "What Is SNMP?" provides a nontechnical overview of network management with SNMP. We introduce the different versions of SNMP as well as the concepts of managers and agents.

Chapter 2, "A Closer Look at SNMP" discusses the technical details of SNMP. We look at the Structure of Management Information (SMI) and the Management Information Base (MIB) and discuss how SNMP actually works; i.e., how management information is sent and received over the network.

Chapter 3, "NMS Architectures" helps you to think about strategies for deploying SNMP.

Chapter 4, "SNMP-Compatible Hardware" discusses what it means when a vendor says that its equipment is "SNMP-compatible."

Chapter 5, "Network-Management Software" introduces some of the available network-management software. We discuss the pros and cons of each package and provide pointers to vendors' web sites. We include both commercial and open source packages in the discussion.

Chapter 6, "Configuring Your NMS" provides a basic understanding of what to expect when installing NMS software by looking at two NMS packages, HP's OpenView and Castle Rock's SNMPc.

Chapter 7, "Configuring SNMP Agents" describes how to configure the Windows SNMP agent and several SNMP agents for Unix, including the Net-SNMP agent. To round the chapter out, we discuss how to configure the embedded agents on two network devices: the Cisco SNMP agent and the APC Symetra SNMP agent.

Chapter 8, "Polling and Setting" shows how you can use command-line tools and Perl to gather (poll) SNMP information and change (set) the state of a managed device.

Chapter 9, "Polling and Thresholds" discusses how to configure OpenView and SNMPc to gather SNMP information via polling. This chapter also discusses RMON configuration on a Cisco router.

Chapter 10, "Traps" examines how to send and receive traps using command-line tools, Perl, OpenView, and other management applications.

Chapter 11, "Extensible SNMP Agents" shows how several popular SNMP agents can be extended. Extensible agents provide end users with a means to extend the operation of an agent without having access to the agent's source code.

Chapter 12, "Adapting SNMP to Fit Your Environment" is geared toward Perl-savvy system administrators. We provide Perl scripts that demonstrate how to perform some common system-administration tasks with SNMP.

Chapter 13, "MRTG" introduces one of the most widely used open source SNMP applications, the Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG). MRTG provides network administrators with web-based usage graphs of router interfaces and can be configured to graph many other kinds of data.

Appendix A, "Using Input and Output Octets" discusses how to use OpenView to graph input and output octets.

Appendix B, "More on OpenView's NNM" discusses how to graph external data with Network Node Manager (NNM), add menu items to NNM, configure user profiles, and use NNM as a centralized communication interface.

Appendix C, "Net-SNMP Tools" summarizes the usage of the Net-SNMP command-line tools.

Appendix D, "SNMP RFCs" provides an authoritative list of the various RFC numbers that pertain to SNMP.

Appendix E, "SNMP Support for Perl" is a good summary of the SNMP Perl module used throughout the book.

Appendix F, "SNMPv3" provides a brief introduction to SNMPv3. Two configuration examples are provided: configuring SNMPv3 on a Cisco router and configuring SNMPv3 for Net-SNMP.