On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 13:52, Sriram venkat wrote:
>    There and 2 protocols that are used in network management products.
> They are SNMP and HTTP.

Those two protocols could certainly be used to transmit
network management information across the network.  But
that's probably about as much as they have in common.

HTTP is a fairly open-ended transmission mechanism.
It's purely concerned with getting information from A
to B, and is not bothered about the structure of that
information.

HTML provides a certain amount of structuring, but is
mostly concerned with how the information should be
*displayed*. It doesn't really deal with the syntax
structure of this information (let alone the semantics). 

SNMP is much more closely defined, and is very clear about
the syntax of the information that's being transmitted.
Not just whether something is a string value, or a number,
or whatever - but associating each value with a particular
"name" (or OID).  It doesn't actually handle the semantics
of what those names mean, but it provides a much cleaner
framework in which to do so.

 
>  What is the difference between them as far as network
> management is concerned and what is the reason they are
> used in their respective products.

HTTP/HTML makes it possible to display management information
is a meaningful way, without needing much in the way of special
software.   You can point a web browser at a given managed
box, and see something sensible straight away.

But this relies on there being an *extremely* complex management
application to interpret the results - namely the network operator
or administrator.   If you had to write a program to interpret
these results (perhaps to extract statistics and feed them into
a monitoring database), then this would be an absolute nightmare.

  You could do it, of course, but you'd need a separate analysis
program for each different bit of kit.  And you'd probably have
to tweak it every time there was an new version of the firmware
that fiddled with the HTML output!


SNMP is much less immediately accessible - great long sequences
of meaningless numbers.  And everything's in binary format
(and transmitted over UDP), so you can't even telnet to the
server and prod it that way.
  But the information that comes back is clearly structured,
so it's much easier to write software to handle this data
automatically.

And this structure is standardised, so the same application
can be used with *all* your network kit.  You don't have to
keep writing new versions of your analysis tools.

 
> Why Snmp is chosen instead of Http and vice versa.

HTTP is aimed at people
SNMP is aimed at management systems.

Dave



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