4-6. Monitoring a Firewall with SNMP

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a protocol that allows the exchange of information about managing a network device. Cisco firewalls can participate in SNMP as follows:

  • A Management Information Base (MIB) is a collection of variables stored on a network device. The device can update the variables, or they can be queried from an external source.

  • MIBs are structured according to the SNMP MIB module language, which is based on the Abstract Syntax Notation 1 (ASN.1) language.

  • An SNMP agent runs on a firewall and maintains various MIB variables. Any query of the variables must be handled through the agent.

  • The SNMP agent can also send unsolicited messages, or traps, to an SNMP manager. Traps are used to ...

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