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What is SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)?

A protocol for monitoring and managing the state of equipment such as routers and switches. The managing side (the manager) queries the agent on the equipment for values defined in the MIB, such as interface traffic counters and CPU usage, and the equipment reports problems with traps. Traffic is worked out by reading counter values at regular intervals and taking the difference. SNMPv3, which supports authentication and encryption, is recommended.

Japanese name: SNMP

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) appears in 2 practice questions across 1 topic, including Network Design and Operations.

Field: Network Design and Operations

Try it: questions about SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)

Using SNMP, a router interface's 64-bit counter of received bytes is read every 5 minutes (300 seconds). The previous reading was 1,200,000,000 and the current one is 4,950,000,000. Which is closest to the average receive rate over these 5 minutes?

  1. A12.5 Mbps
  2. B100 Mbps
  3. C500 Mbps
Show answer and explanation

Answer: B. 100 Mbps

The interface received 4,950,000,000 − 1,200,000,000 = 3,750,000,000 bytes in 5 minutes, or 3.75×10⁹ × 8 = 3×10¹⁰ bits. Dividing by 300 seconds gives 1×10⁸ bit/s, or 100 Mbps. In SNMP, the managing side (the manager) queries MIB values from the agent on the device and, as here, works out traffic from differences between counter readings to draw graphs. A 32-bit counter wraps back to 0 after 2^32 ≈ 4.29×10⁹ bytes, which at 100 Mbps takes only about 344 seconds, so 64-bit counters are used for fast interfaces.

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) in the explanations

Questions that mention SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) (2)

  1. Using SNMP, a router interface's 64-bit counter of received bytes is read every 5 minutes (300 seconds). The previous reading was 1,200,000,000 and the current one is 4,950,000,000. Which is closest to the average receive rate over these 5 minutes?
  2. For the traffic passing through a router, you want to find out how many bytes are taken up by each combination of source and destination (addresses, port numbers and protocol), aggregated per stream of traffic. Which mechanism is the most appropriate to use?

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Comparisons that include this term

Related terms

Router Packet ACL (access control list) Administrative distance BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Broadcast domain Link aggregation Longest prefix match OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) Path MTU discovery

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