The SNMP traffic grapher and its many uses

by | Sep 9, 2014 | Iris Graphing

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has been a trusted tool in the monitoring and management of network attached devices since the early days. Network administrators have relied on SNMP to monitor devices such as routers, switches, servers and many others in order to manage their systems. An SNMP traffic grapher makes the administration of large networks a much simpler task.

With the volume of data processed over large networks, things can get a little complicated.

Managers and engineers need to make sense of huge quantities of information on many devices spanning vast areas.

An SNMP traffic grapher assists by taking the information generated by network devices, and presenting it in a graphing format that IT staff can easily understand for  analysis and troubleshooting.

Once the desired metrics to be measured have been determined, IT staff are able to monitor the health and status of their environments.

Some of the metrics that can be monitored using SNMP are:

  • Interface traffic utilization
  • Policy map traffic utilization
  • CPU , memory and other health metrics of the device
  • SLA metric’s including jitter, packet loss, latency
  • Radio frequency and DB levels
  • Temperature and humidity
  • Device performance statistics
  • Device errors and critical events

An SNMP traffic grapher makes for simple analysis of complicated networks

Network administrators and engineers tasked with managing environments with servers or other hardware running disparate operating systems are able to utilize SNMP for monitoring due to its availability on almost any network device. Its diversity is where its strength lies, and 3rd party vendors understand this.

A 3rd party SNMP traffic grapher repurposes the rich data collected from network devices and present this information in a way that is easily consumed by IT staff. Once the OIDs (Object Identifiers) are specified, data is then collected by the management system and presented to IT. With its flexibility and popularity as a monitoring tool, the SNMP traffic grapher is a must-have for IT departments concerned with the management of large environments.

Image credit: Pixabay