Managed Services using SNMP

As nowadays in India Every ISP is talking about Manage services, What exactly is manage services ? Which protocol is responsible for this.  How any one do this ? In this section we will discuss about all this...

ISP are the service providers which offers many interactive services to customers, Customers stands for any enterprises or any Big companies in any domain. Every customer  has their own domain and business, as they have huge presence for own business. To manage this, they take links from service providers. But if sometime the links goes down or if they want to check the link quality / utilization. For all this information, they need to maintain own network team to do it and using any NMS. 

                           

NMS stands for Network Monitoring system. This system will monitor your whole network (Initially you need to configure and setup) as per your requirement.This will provide you interactive reports about Link availability/ Utilization/ etc   , But to maintain all this. It will some cost which is incurred by customers. Now ISP’s are offering these services along with link.

                ISP will monitor everything for customer, as per requirement and provide report to customer. Which will help customer to focus on own business and to avoid resources for this work.

Till now we had discussed, how real time market is accepting Manage services .. Let’s see technically what is manage services how this works...

SNMP is very important protocol for this service. Let’s see what is SNMP

SNMP means Simple Network Management Protocol. For better understanding we can divide it into 3 components –

Managed devices

Agents

Network Management System/Network Monitoring System (NMS)

  A managed device is a node that will have a SNMP agent installed or configured or it will support SNMP protocol, which needs to be enabled for this operations. The network devices can be Routers, Switches, etc.  An agent is software process/module with in network device. This provides SNMP information to NMS.

                Then major job of SNMP agent is collect all the required information from network device and send it to NMS in suitable format. This is only possible by SNMP. The NMS is application; It will process the received data from SNMP and provide interactive reports to Users.

But to get detailed information about any network device we should have MIB for that device.

Let’s see something about MIB:

MIB means  Management Information Base. It is a collection of information of network device organized hierarchically. MIB is used to manage a network device remotely with full flexibility. It will help you to provide more information about the device functionality and real time information.

This information is accessed using a SNMP protocol.

OIDs means Object Identifiers. It is used uniquely to identify and managed objects in a MIB hierarchy. We can say, MIB is collection of OID(information) for device, which will help SNMP protocol to get particular information in detail from concern network device. As you check the OIDs in MIB, you can see detail description of that OID in MIB. It will help you to know more about that OID. Every vendor has own MIBs to manage own products.

How this works  –

SNMP works with NMS. NMS send out a request to managed devices , in return a it will receive a response message. In this 4 steps are involved – Get, GerNext, Set and Trap. SNMP header consists of a header and PDU (protocol Dataunits). In that header it will contain – SNMP version information and community string. The community name is used for security reasons, To access data from network device community name should match.

The PDU depends on the type of message that is being sent. The Get, GetNext, and Set, as well as the response PDU, consist of PDU type, Request ID, Error status, Error index and Object/variable fields. The Trap consist of Enterprise, Agent, Agent address, Generic trap type, Specific trap code, Timestamp and Object/Value fields.

After collection of all information NMS process the received data and provide customized reports.

SNMP is very important for Managed services .

Some well known NMS –

Orion Solarwinds

Manage Engine Netflow

CA – Ehealth

IPSwitch – WhatsupGold

HP Openview

IBM – Tivoli

Hope this information is useful for you. For likes and any queries, Plz comment with your mail id...