SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) was developed to provide a tool for multivendor, interoperable network management. SNMP provides a set of standards for network management, including a protocol, a database structure specification, and a set of data objects. SNMP was adopted as the standard for TCP/IP-based intemets in 1989.
An explanation of SNMP technology is beyond the scope of this document and the reader is assumed to be either conversant with SNMP or to have access to conventional textbooks on the subject, such as William Stallings, "SNMP, SNMPv2 and RMON," Addison Wesley (1996), which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety as background information.
When a network management station first encounters a SNMP-manageable device, it is fairly easy for the management station to obtain a dump of all the MIB (Management Information Base) objects supported by that device's SNMP agent, simply by walking through the agent's MIB with GET-NEXT or GET-BULK PDUs. Unfortunately, the information that the management station can obtain in this way is nearly useless without additional resources that are not usually available from the SNMP agent. The most obvious example of such a resource is the ASN.1 specification of the MIB module that contains the objects in question: without the ASN.1 specification, most of the contents of most MIB modules are just collections of unlabeled integers. Other useful resources might be a human-readable specification of the MIB module (such as an RFC document in the case of an IETF Standards track MIB), or specialized executable code to perform higher-level management of the object.
At present, these additional resources must be provided via external means, usually by tracking down floppy disks or anonymous FTP sites, and then manually configuring the management station to use the additional resources.
It is a goal of the present invention to greatly simply and facilitate the management of remotely located, SNMP-manageable devices, even when the structure of the MIB modules for the device's SNMP agent is not known to the user or the user's management station.
It is also a goal to enable users to communicate with the SNMP agents of SNMP-manageable devices through the use of standard WWW browsers.