The previous chapter talked about different approaches to verifying remote computers and the services they offer. This chapter covers another way of monitoring remote machines and devices.

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a protocol that is designed to monitor and manage various devices connected to a network. Its main purpose is to create a standardized way of getting and setting parameters regardless of the underlying hardware. The protocol allows the retrieval of information from a device, setting options, and also covers the means for a device to notify other machines about a failure.

SNMP is an industry standard, and all major hardware and software vendors support it. All commonly-used operating systems can provide information using SNMP. Microsoft offers SNMP for their Windows platform; all UNIX systems have SNMP daemons that receive requests from the other machines.

SNMP also offers a standardized, hierarchical way to group and access information, called...