SNMP Measurement Point

From GEANT2-JRA1 Wiki

1 Overview
2 Objectives
3 Achievements
- 3.1 Downloads
4 Work in Progress
5 Future Work
6 Contact Information and Feedback

Overview

SNMP is one of the most widely used protocols for controlling and polling network devices. Polling includes retrieval of certain data (such as packet counter values) stored within the network element. More information about SNMP itself can be found on wikipedia [here], which also provides links to RFCs.

A variety of SNMP based tools for monitoring network devices are in use. Most of these tools have very little features which can provide controlled access to network devices to the users of multiple domains. Measurement Point service for SNMP aims to satisfy these needs and provide the capability to build a wide variety of clients and tools which can depend on it for data but at the same time be configurable enough so as to not allow network element overloading or cause concern to the Network operators.

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Objectives

A Measurement Point service for SNMP aims to provide a Web Service access to the usage of SNMP along with all the features that a perfSONAR Measurement Point compliant service can offer. Some of such features include

Multi-domain measurement data exchange
Capability discovery
Efficient access to data (usage of keys)
Scheduling
Resource protection, Authentication and other security mechanism

The objectives are defined further in terms of long term and short term. The long term objectives are

To provide Web Service (and hence multi-domain access) to at least the most important and widely used features of SNMP taking into account the following constraints
- Protect the resource (network element, SNMP Agent)
- Authorize the requests

The short term objectives are:

Identify the steps in which different SNMP features can be used in a Web Service model
Provide efficient and reliable Web Service based access to SNMP GET feature
Support multiple versions of SNMP
Periodic data retrieval and Data PUSH (to interested clients)

The long term objectives are:

Incorporate security model supported by perfSONAR and advocated by GEANT2 JRA5
Authorization and Resource protection
Integrate more SNMP features (Walk, GET BULK, MIB Browsing)

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Achievements

The current release supports the following features:

SNMP Get functionality
Key based access mechanism where keys are configured into the service
- Provides efficient access to data
- Restricts the type of data that a user can retrieve

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