Computer network administration: SNMP protocol

Today, information systems and networks are critical to a company's competitiveness. Poor performance translates into lost productivity, and service unavailability into lost sales, operating irregularities or production interruptions. The quality of the overall service rendered to users must be guaranteed, which implies mastery of a complex set of systems, networks, middleware and applications. This must be achieved at minimum cost. The challenge of network administration (and information system administration in general) is to provide this control at the lowest possible cost. The essential elements to master are :

• costs: both development and integration costs, but also and above all operational costs (maintenance, support, upgrades, etc.), which are often overlooked but make up a significant part of the final bill;

• quality of service (QoS: Quality of Service), which can be broken down into several criteria, from the end-user's point of view:

  • availability,

  • response time,

  • reliability,

  • safety (a subject in itself) ;

• responsiveness :

  • in the face of technological developments that need to be kept up to date, which means making evolving technological choices,

  • to cope with growth or evolution requirements, which are not always easy to manage (a classic example is an application that is well suited to operation on a local network, but which will not be suited to operation on wide-area networks, if it uses numerous protocol exchanges resulting in high response times when the network has significant latency),

  • in the face of change (relocation, restructuring, new needs, etc.),

  • in the face of problems that are bound to arise.

In this context, network administration represents all the activities involved in planning, supervising and operating networks, while respecting cost and QoS constraints.

It's rare for a company to have experts on site who can diagnose and intervene effectively on all potential problems. It is therefore necessary to set up tools enabling specialists to diagnose and intervene remotely.

Furthermore, network complexity increases combinatorially with the number of systems to be managed. Finally, today's network administrator often has to manage complex heterogeneity, in...