[Ericsson AB]

1 SNMP Introduction

The SNMP development toolkit contains the following parts:

The SNMP development tool provides an environment for rapid agent/manager prototyping and construction. With the following information provided, this tool is used to set up a running multi-lingual SNMP agent/manager:

The advantage of using an extensible (agent/manager) toolkit is to remove details such as type-checking, access rights, Protocol Data Unit (PDU), encoding, decoding, and trap distribution from the programmer, who only has to write the instrumentation functions, which implement the MIBs. The get-next function only has to be implemented for tables, and not for every variable in the global naming tree. This information can be deduced from the ASN.1 file.

1.1 Scope and Purpose

This manual describes the SNMP development tool, as a component of the Erlang/Open Telecom Platform development environment. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the Erlang Development Environment, which is described in a separate User's Guide.

1.2 Prerequisites

The following prerequisites is required for understanding the material in the SNMP User's Guide:

The tool requires Erlang release 4.7 or later.

1.3 Definitions

The following definitions are used in the SNMP User's Guide.

MIB
The conceptual repository for management information is called the Management Information Base (MIB). It does not hold any data, merely a definition of what data can be accessed. A definition of an MIB is a description of a collection of managed objects.
SMI
The MIB is specified in an adapted subset of the Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) language. This adapted subset is called the Structure of Management Information (SMI).
ASN.1
ASN.1 is used in two different ways in SNMP. The SMI is based on ASN.1, and the messages in the protocol are defined by using ASN.1.
Managed object
A resource to be managed is represented by a managed object, which resides in the MIB. In an SNMP MIB, the managed objects are either:
Operations
SNMP relies on the three basic operations: get (object), set (object, value) and get-next (object).
Instrumentation function
An instrumentation function is associated with each managed object. This is the function, which actually implements the operations and will be called by the agent when it receives a request from the management station.
Manager
A manager generates commands and receives notifications from agents. There usually are only a few managers in a system.
Agent
An agent responds to commands from the manager, and sends notification to the manager. There are potentially many agents in a systrem.

1.4 About This Manual

In addition to this introductory chapter, the SNMP User's Guide contains the following chapters:

1.5 Where to Find More Information

Refer to the following documentation for more information about SNMP and about the Erlang/OTP development system:


snmp 4.9.3
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