Managers

SNMP management programs are referred to as managers. Managers obtain data about network devices and make this information available to a network administrator through textual, graphical, or object-oriented user interfaces. The manager program sends SNMP messages to network hosts. These messages are received by the agent on the host, and initiate the get, get-next, and set operations. The manager program waits (listens) for the SNMP messages from the agent that contain the results of the operation, and displays the information on the SNMP-management console or saves the data in a specified file or database.

As noted earlier, the SNMP service running under Windows NT is an SNMP agent, which is the necessary framework needed for network management. However a separate SNMP manager program is needed to perform management operations.

There are several SNMP manager utilities provided with the Windows NT Server Resource Kit compact disc. Other network management software can be obtained from Microsoft or from third-party vendors.