ZyXEL Communications Wireless Gateway Series Figure 13-5SNMP Management Model

ZyAIR Wireless Gateway Series User’s Guide

Figure 13-5 SNMP Management Model

An SNMP managed network consists of two main types of component: agents and a manager.

An agent is a management software module that resides in a managed device (the ZyAIR). An agent translates the local management information from the managed device into a form compatible with SNMP. The manager is the console through which network administrators perform network management functions. It executes applications that control and monitor managed devices.

The managed devices contain object variables/managed objects that define each piece of information to be collected about a device. Examples of variables include the number of packets received, node port status etc. A Management Information Base (MIB) is a collection of managed objects. SNMP allows a manager and agents to communicate for the purpose of accessing these objects.

SNMP itself is a simple request/response protocol based on the manager/agent model. The manager issues a request and the agent returns responses using the following protocol operations:

•Get - Allows the manager to retrieve an object variable from the agent.

•GetNext - Allows the manager to retrieve the next object variable from a table or list within an agent. In SNMPv1, when a manager wants to retrieve all elements of a table from an agent, it initiates a Get operation, followed by a series of GetNext operations.

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