Audience for This Book

This book is intended for system and network administrators who could benefit from using SNMP to manage their equipment but who have little or no experience with SNMP or SNMP applications. In our experience, almost any network, no matter how small, can benefit from using SNMP. If you're a Perl programmer, this book will give you some ideas about how to write scripts that use SNMP to help manage your network. If you're not a Perl user, you can use many of the other tools we present, ranging from Net-SNMP (an open source collection of command-line tools) to Hewlett-Packard's OpenView (a high-end, high-priced network management platform).