SNMP is now the most common management protocol and that is rightly so. Nevertheless which are the alternative protocol solutions, not to mention why decide to use SNMP? Are there any times when some other protocols could be put to use or simply are best utilized? These are typically concerns that a number of persons try to ask every once in awhile. For this reason I'll make an effort to help answer each of them currently, based on my own 20 years experience within Element, Network and also Service Management. Note that the next few paragraphs should really be used simply as food for thought regarding the current network management protocol options, i.e. SNMP, CLI, Netconf as well as Netflow/IPFIX.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) released the SNMP protocol around the 1980s and it was quickly identified as a good network management protocol. From the beginning of the 21st century it became visible the fact despite that was originally designed, SNMP was not used to set up network equipment, but rather had been principally used for the purpose of network monitoring, i.e. Fault and Performance Management.
Within 2002, the Internet Architecture Board and people in IETF's network management circle got together with network operators to talk about the matter. The results from this meeting are really recorded inside RFC 3535. It appears service providers had been largely employing proprietary Command Line Interfaces (CLI) to set up their devices. CLI contained a variety of features which the operators appreciated, like the indisputable fact that it seemed to be text-based, compared to the BER-encoded SNMP. Note also that many equipment manufacturers wouldn't provide the option to wholly setup their very own products via SNMP.
Since operators generally liked to compose scripts to support set up their particular equipment, they did consider the CLI missing in various ways. Particularly disturbing was the unforeseen character of the result. The info and layout of output seemed to be susceptible to alteration in unpredictable ways. Simultaneously, Juniper Networks ended up employing an XML-based network management methodology. This has been taken to the IETF and distributed to the broader community. Together, both of these happenings led IETF in to the development of NetConf protocol which is certainly likely to be much better aligned with the requirements of network operators and devices suppliers.
Finally, specifically for routers/switches and IP networks, CISCO quickly understood that an increasingly compact protocol than SNMP seemed to be essential to scale significantly better for collection of performance counters on IP networks. Netflow, designed by CISCO is a standard nowadays (termed IPfix) that's been integrated by a lot of routers/switches Vendors.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) released the SNMP protocol around the 1980s and it was quickly identified as a good network management protocol. From the beginning of the 21st century it became visible the fact despite that was originally designed, SNMP was not used to set up network equipment, but rather had been principally used for the purpose of network monitoring, i.e. Fault and Performance Management.
Within 2002, the Internet Architecture Board and people in IETF's network management circle got together with network operators to talk about the matter. The results from this meeting are really recorded inside RFC 3535. It appears service providers had been largely employing proprietary Command Line Interfaces (CLI) to set up their devices. CLI contained a variety of features which the operators appreciated, like the indisputable fact that it seemed to be text-based, compared to the BER-encoded SNMP. Note also that many equipment manufacturers wouldn't provide the option to wholly setup their very own products via SNMP.
Since operators generally liked to compose scripts to support set up their particular equipment, they did consider the CLI missing in various ways. Particularly disturbing was the unforeseen character of the result. The info and layout of output seemed to be susceptible to alteration in unpredictable ways. Simultaneously, Juniper Networks ended up employing an XML-based network management methodology. This has been taken to the IETF and distributed to the broader community. Together, both of these happenings led IETF in to the development of NetConf protocol which is certainly likely to be much better aligned with the requirements of network operators and devices suppliers.
Finally, specifically for routers/switches and IP networks, CISCO quickly understood that an increasingly compact protocol than SNMP seemed to be essential to scale significantly better for collection of performance counters on IP networks. Netflow, designed by CISCO is a standard nowadays (termed IPfix) that's been integrated by a lot of routers/switches Vendors.
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Finally, if you like to learn more, don't forget to check the following interesting posts: A History of SNMP and comparison with other protocols and What is the TMN Network Management model
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