Skip to Main Content
Essential SNMP, 2nd Edition
book

Essential SNMP, 2nd Edition

by Douglas Mauro, Kevin Schmidt
September 2005
Beginner content levelBeginner
462 pages
12h 56m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Essential SNMP, 2nd Edition

External Polling

It is often impossible to poll a device internally, for technical, security, or political reasons. For example, the System Administration group may not be in the habit of giving out the root password, making it difficult for you to install and maintain internal polling scripts. However, they may have no problem with installing and maintaining an SNMP agent such as Concord's SystemEDGE or Net-SNMP. It's also possible that you will find yourself in an environment in which you lack the knowledge to build the tools necessary to poll internally. Despite the situation, if an SNMP agent is present on a machine that has objects worth polling, you can use an external device to poll the machine and read the objects' values.[*] This external device can be one or more NMSs or other machines or devices. For instance, when you have a decent-size network, it is sometimes convenient, and possibly necessary, to distribute polling among several NMSs.

Each of the external polling engines we will look at uses the same polling methods, although some NMSs implement external polling differently. We'll start with the OpenView xnmgraph program, which can be used to collect and display data graphically. You can even use OpenView to save the data for later retrieval and analysis. We'll include some examples that show how you can collect data and store it automatically and how you can retrieve that data for display. Castle Rock's SNMPc also has an excellent data-collection facility that we ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Essential SNMP

Essential SNMP

Douglas Mauro, Kevin Schmidt
UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, 5th Edition

UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, 5th Edition

Trent R. Hein, Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Ben Whaley, Dan Mackin

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596008406Supplemental ContentErrata Page