What SNMP data can tell us about edge-to-edge network performance

Abstract

With the high speeds of today's networks, monitoring information is most of the time either summarized or sampled. This policy is even more profound in network backbones, where aggregation of data from several sources and in very high speeds is often observed. The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) [5] is widely used to provide aggregated link usage data from network components. These data, even without a great amount of detail, provide a valuable source for network administrators, aiding decisions about network routing, provisioning and configuration. SNMP data are simple to collect and maintain, providing a low disk space for historical network usage log. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.