The following are some of the advantages of SNMP:
It provides a single framework for monitoring many different kinds of
devices.
It is based on open standards documented in IETF RFCs.
It is easily extensible.There are also disadvantages with SNMP, including the
following:
The lack of writable MIBs (Management Information Bases) leads to
poor configuration capabilities. SNMP is rarely used for configuration
purposes.
The lack of atomic transactions makes rollbacks to previous states
difficult.
SNMP is slow for monitoring purposes when large amounts of
operational data need to be retrieved.
It is CPU and memory resource intensive when large amounts of
performance metrics are retrieved.Even though SNMP was originally designed to support
both monitoring and configuration capabilities,
historically only the monitoring capabilities were used.
The SNMP specification defines the following three
components:
Managed devices
SNMP agent
SNMP managerManaged devices are the devices that are being
monitored and managed through SNMP. They
implement an SNMP interface through which the SNMP
manager monitors and controls the device. The SNMP
agent is the software component that runs on the
managed device and translates between the local
management information on the device and the SNMP
version of that information. The SNMP manager, also
called the Network Management Station (NMS), is the
application that monitors and controls the managed