How will monitoring SNMP Devices impact network traffic in the local network environment? (NETIQKB43527)

How will monitoring SNMP Devices impact network traffic in the local network environment?

In general, monitoring SNMP Devices with the NetIQ AppManager for SNMP module (SNMP Toolkit) has minimal impact on the amount of network traffic. In general, SNMP requests and responses are small and in most cases there is only one request/response exchange per job interval with an SNMP Device.

SyncPoll/SyncPollTable Scripts

There will only be one request/response performed at each polling interval. Even with the short default interval of 5 seconds, the network traffic is insignificant.

Discovery_Snmp Script

This script will cause a slightly higher level of sustained SNMP requests/responses as it iteratively attempts to discover each configured device. Again, this network traffic should still be insignificant.

SyncGetTable and SyncPollTable Scripts

The use of these two scripts can cause bursts of SNMP network traffic. At each job interval, the SNMP Table to be monitored is retrieved. With SNMP, this must be done with iterative 'Get Next' requests/responses. Each request/response retrieves one table row. Monitoring large SNMP tables will result in a burst of 'GetNext' request/responses at each job interval execution.

Depending on the application, some SNMP Tables can have thousands of rows, which could cause sustained heavy network traffic for several minutes each time the job is executed. There are multiple parameters available on the SyncGetTable and SyncPollTable Scripts to filter the number of rows retrieved. These options should be used in situations where these two scripts may cause unacceptable bursts of network traffic.

Formerly known as NETIQKB43527