Simple Network Management Protocol is referred to as SNMP. It is an Internet-standard protocol designed to manage devices on IP networks. Some of the devices that typically support SNMP include routers, switches, servers, workstations, printers, and modem racks, as well as a variety of other devices.
SNMP is used mostly in network management systems to monitor network-attached devices, looking for conditions that warrant administrative attention. It is a component of the Internet Protocol Suite as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It consists of a set of standards for network management, including an application layer protocol, a database schema, and a set of data objects.
Ray Coulombe is the founder and managing director of SecuritySpecifiers.com, Sal D’Agostino is CEO of IDmachines, and both agree that SNMP is a pretty useful protocol and think it is time the industry did something with it. SNMP is not something new; in fact, it’s been around for about 25 years.
Rather than being pushed to the side in favor of other architecture, which is what was expected, SNMP actually continued to evolve. This has led to it receiving even broader acceptance than anticipated. It has the ability to work with a variety of different network monitoring packages, which makes it quite useful.
Since it is designed to support so many different devices and as mentioned above, look for conditions that warrant administrative attention, IT departments can use SNMP to check for out of limit or alarm conditions. It also has the ability to update device parameters. So, while it might not be the newest kid on the block, it doesn’t look like it will be leaving the neighborhood anytime soon.
SNMP is now getting support from the Security Industry Association’s (SIA) Standards Committee. Because of this, the security industry is attempting to provide integrators, A&Es and end users a roadmap related to SNMP usage and implementation.
Coulombe is the SIA SNMP subcommittee chairman and D’Agostino is the co-chair. According to SecurityInfoWatch.com, the committee will hold another meeting next week and is inviting security industry vendors to attend.
“This effort seeks to bring together under one umbrella all of the collective knowledge we can muster in order to allow the security industry to make its devices function with network management software via a protocol that has been in the IT industry for 15 years,” Coulombe said.
He also feels that while many manufacturers offer a variety of functionality under SNMP through Management Information Base (MIB) embedded in their devices, there has been very little “rhyme nor reason” to what is being monitored or managed on these devices. If you think about it, this makes it a rather useless feature. Coulombe added that this results in “missed opportunities to leverage IT protocols and more importantly, to better serve customers.”
D’Agostino’s feeling on this matter is, “End-users, manufacturers and system integrators on the SNMP subcommittee are leveraging Internet standards to develop a common means of monitoring physical security devices. As is the case with applications programming interfaces (APIs), most companies have developed proprietary approaches. The good thing about what the SNMP subcommittee is doing is that it leaves these intact. What we are trying to do is to get to a first set of non-proprietary data elements common across vendors of a given physical security device type. This is an important step forward from the legacy proprietary to open interfaces and it opens up a wide range of services that can be provided.”
The feeling is that there are a great number of vendors who have their own unique set of MIBs. Unfortunately, they are only discoverable by software packages that have been configured to look for them. That means that their usage is sparse at best.
In an effort to rectify this, the SIA recently approved an attempt to develop an industry set of standard MIBs. This will have the effect of having vendors from across the industry getting together to decide which conditions will merit monitoring, capturing or configuring.
Some of the types of conditions that might be included are things such as loss of video, intensity of video compression, excessively high access card retries, over-current, under voltage, hard disk drive utilization, excessive temperature and loss of pressure.
An industry consultant and subcommittee member, Rodney Thayer, explains that, “The use of standards-based network management provides a valuable addition to the set of tools one can use to manage a modern converged security infrastructure. It benefits customers and their vendor supply chain through enhanced visibility of the infrastructure and assisting to provide more proactive maintenance. It will help position physical security solutions to address evolving customer needs, which are including more and more IT-centric requirements.”
It will be interesting to see what the SIA SNMP committee comes up with and how it will help to simplify monitoring the various network components that IT departments have to deal with on a daily basis.