SNMP

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is used to monitor many different types of managed resources, from hardware routers to software products. Network management systems such as monitoring tools use SNMP to gather information from various managed resources and then present this information to the user. These tools usually incorporate alert services that flag anomalies in the runtime state of the system. Any resource that needs to participate in this SNMP framework needs to implement an SNMP agent, which serves as the communication endpoint for the management system. Management systems use SNMP to interact with any agents available on the network, polling the agents for required information about their operational state. SNMP also supports trap notifications, event-like data items that SNMP agents automatically broadcast to any listening management systems. WebLogic's SNMP agent supports the SNMPv1 and SNMPv2 protocols.

In this chapter, you will learn how a WebLogic domain can be treated like any other managed resource on the network, thereby allowing you to integrate it with any standard SNMP tools that you may use. For example, you may already have an SNMP framework in place that monitors your network resources. Using WebLogic's SNMP agent, an entire WebLogic domain can be seamlessly integrated with your existing infrastructure, allowing you to treat WebLogic and all its deployments like any other SNMP resource.