Secret agents: Make SNMP work for you
Date: March 5th, 2010
Author: Mark Underwood
Blogger Mark Underwood lays out the ways you can use SNMP agents to monitor network devices, and even set it up to send software alerts as well.
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Out there, working for you, are agents. Feed them a little port UDP/161,162 and they'll deliver a dossier on many network devices, in the form of a Management Information Base (MIB).
Just got hired after the last network administrator got promoted to CIO? Grab a free network management tool that has an SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) agent listener (SpiceWorks, Net-SNMP, NetXMS, Nagios, Zenoss and many more), then head over to the local Wi-Fi-enabled coffee establishment. Chances are good you'll have charts and diagrams to visualize what you've gotten yourself into.
