SNMP is designed to be easy to implement and to provide a uniform way to access information on various machines.

It is designed so that the footprint of the SNMP services is minimal. This allows devices with a very limited size of storage and operating memory to still use the protocol. SNMP uses the UDP protocol (User Datagram Protocol; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol) , which requires much less resources than TCP. It also uses one packet for sending a single request or response operation, so the protocol itself is stateless.

Each machine that is managed by SNMP has an application that responds to requests from this and other computers. Such an application is called an agent. For UNIX systems, it is usually a daemon working in the background. Many devices with embedded systems have SNMP support included in the system core. In all of these cases, a device needs to listen for SNMP requests and respond accordingly.

All agents are usually managed...