Nowadays, the Internet expands rapidly and the network scale also grows increasingly large. A large-scale network may consist of various devices. On such a network, the diversity and the great number of devices bring a great challenge to network management, that is, how to effectively manage the complex network and provide high-quality network services.
Network management plays a critical role in the whole network solution. The following four elements are involved in the network management:
Managed node: is a device to be managed.
Agent: is the software or hardware that functions to trace the status of the managed node.
Manager: communicates with the agents that reside in managed nodes, and displays the status of the nodes.
Network management protocol: works to exchange information between the manager and the agents.
At present, the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is most widely used for network management over the TCP/IP-based networks.