What Is The Purpose Of Simple Network Management Protocol?

SNMP is the abbreviation of Simple Network Management Protocol. It is used for monitoring the network performance and hence for the management of a network. Managing and troubleshooting a large network is a difficult task and is not possible without the use of special tools that are specially designed for this purpose. It helpful because it provides interfaces to interact with the network nodes and tools to get the related information and statistics. It was developed to work over UDP. It provides a model to manage the network and this network has the following basic elements.

  Management Station
  Agent
  Management Information Base
  Network management protocol
Network Management Station provides an interface so that the manager can interact with the system. Agent software is installed on the internet working devices (switches, routers, gateways etc). Network management station interacts with the agent to get information about the devices and agents perform certain task as requested by the station.
Management information base is a collection of the objects that represent the resources in the network. These objects are the access points at the agent. Agent software responds to the management station by collecting information from these objects. Network management serves as a link between the management station and the agents.

It's an application layer protocol, used for managing devices in an internet using TCP/IP. It provides the set of operations for monitoring and maintaining an internet. Just like a manager and the agent, in which  manager, a host, controls and monitors a set of agents, usually routers.

A management station, called a manager runs the SNMP client program. A managed station, called an agent, is a router that runs the SNMP server program. The agent keeps performance information in database and the manager access the values in the database.

MANAGEMENT COMPONENTS:
SNMP supported with
1.SMI (Structure of Management Information)
Define rules for naming and defining objects and structures uses SNMP for communicating in the heterogeneous internet environment, having different manufacturers.

2.MIB (Management Information Base)
Creates a collection of named objects, their types, and their relationships to each other in an environment to be managed.

These are defined in 1157,1212,1213 RFCs.