H3C Technologies H3C S3100 Series Switches - Manual (Page 456)

Operation Manual – SNMP and RMON
H3C S3100-52P Ethernet Switch Chapter 2 RMON Configuration
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Chapter 2 RMON Configuration
2.1 Introduction to RMON
Remote monitoring (RMON) is a kind of management information base (MIB) defined
by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is the most important enhancement made
to MIB II standards. RMON is mainly used to monitor the data traffic across a network
segment or even the entire network, and is currently a commonly used network
management standard.
An RMON system comprises of two parts: the network management station (NMS) and
the agents running on network devices. RMON agents operate on network monitors or
network probes to collect and keep track of the statistics of the traffic across the
network segments to which their ports connect, such as the total number of the packets
on a network segment in a specific period of time and the total number of packets
successfully sent to a specific host.
RMON is fully based on simple network management protocol (SNMP) architecture. As
it is compatible with the current SNMP implementations, you can implement RMON
without modifying the existing SNMP implementation. RMON enables SNMP to monitor
remote network devices more effectively and actively, thus providing a satisfactory
means of monitoring remote subnets. With RMON implemented, the communication
traffic between NMS and agents can reduced, thus facilitating the management of
large-scale internetworks.
2.1.1 Working Mechanism of RMON
RMON allows multiple monitors. It can collect data in the following two ways:
z
Using the dedicated RMON probes. When an RMON system operates in this way,
the NMS directly obtains management information from the RMON probes and
controls the network resources. In this case, all information in the RMON MIB can
be obtained.
z
Embedding RMON agents into network devices (such as routers, switches and
hubs) directly to make the latter capable of RMON probe functions. When an
RMON system operates in this way, the NMS collects network management
information by exchanging information with the SNMP agents using the basic
SNMP commands. However, this way depends on device resources heavily and
an NMS operating in this way can only obtain the information about these four
groups (instead of all the information in the RMON MIB): alarm group, event group,
history group, and statistics group.
An S3100-52P Ethernet switch implements RMON in the second way. With an RMON
agent embedded in, an S3100-52P Ethernet switch can serve as a network device with