A characterization study of SNMP usage patterns

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), proposed almost 20 years ago, still remains as the de facto standard for TCP/IP networks managing. However, there are few studies that present the real usage of SNMP in production networks. This work aims at presenting a characterization study that was performed over a sample of the management traffic from the Brazilian Education and Research Network (RNP). The achieved results may help both academy and industry in the development of new technologies for managing networks, in order to better meet the needs of the production networks users and administrators.