Limitations and problems of management applications that use enterprise extensions to the SNMP MIB

Abstract

Until some years ago, management of TCP/IP based products was done in a proprietary fashion. Many large companies build their own system-wide management facilities because of a lack of usable systems to manage heterogeneous networks. These incorporated a variety of homegrown and vendor-supplied products {5]. The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) was subsequently released in an attempt to manage the different network topologies of complex internetwork systems. The lack of standardization inherent in the manufacturer specific extensions to the basic SNMP MIB, however, is a major problem. The objective of this paper is to provide network managers with a clear view of the problems concerning standardized management for a heterogeneous network using the SNMP standard. It will be shown how the standard Internet MIB was extended to manufacturer-based MIBs. The authors will look at what the Internet community intended SNMP to do and the shortcomings and problems of the implementations of this standard, focusing on the enterprise extensions to the Management Information Base (MIB). A few suggestions are then made on how to overcome these problems.