What is an SNMPWalk? Why do I care?
SNMPWalk is a technique for retrieving a number of SNMP variables from a networked device. People use it primarily as a troubleshooting or testing facility to view the current state of a device, or to see what information could be retrieved from it. Here are a couple use cases:
SNMP is a protocol (a set of rules for sending network traffic) that allows one machine to request configuration or operational data from another computer over a network. SNMP specifies the names of the variables (also known as an Object IDentifiers, or OIDs),
SNMP has two ways of requesting a particular value or statistic: GetRequest or GetNextRequest. When a computer issues a GetRequest, it and receives back the value for that name (or Object IDentifier - OID). The GetNextRequest allows a requesting computer to request "the OID *after* the one being requested."
An SNMPWalk is a sequence of GetNextRequest queries initiated by one device. The first request is for the value of an initial OID. When that response arrives, the device requests "the next one", then the next, then the next, and so on. When the respondor has no more values to send, it returns a "no such name" response, and the sequence of requests is done.
- A technician wants to investigate the settings/readings of a particular piece of network equipment. The SNMPWalk command of net-snmp or other tool such as Mibble or InterMapper will return one or several values that show the state of the device: temperature, traffic or error rates for an interface, its speed (bits/sec), CPU, memory or disk utilization, etc.
- A customer wants to create a custom InterMapper Probe for a particular device. An SNMPWalk will return the current values from the device (as well as their OIDs) to provide the information for building the probe.
SNMP is a protocol (a set of rules for sending network traffic) that allows one machine to request configuration or operational data from another computer over a network. SNMP specifies the names of the variables (also known as an Object IDentifiers, or OIDs),
SNMP has two ways of requesting a particular value or statistic: GetRequest or GetNextRequest. When a computer issues a GetRequest, it and receives back the value for that name (or Object IDentifier - OID). The GetNextRequest allows a requesting computer to request "the OID *after* the one being requested."
An SNMPWalk is a sequence of GetNextRequest queries initiated by one device. The first request is for the value of an initial OID. When that response arrives, the device requests "the next one", then the next, then the next, and so on. When the respondor has no more values to send, it returns a "no such name" response, and the sequence of requests is done.
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