SNMP
SNMP is the standard IETF network monitoring and management protocol used for polling device status, reading management objects, and receiving event notifications from monitored devices. In AV environments it most often appears at the observability layer: a switch, DSP, control processor, AV-over-IP endpoint, UPS, or monitoring gateway exposes health data as an SNMP agent, and an NMS or monitoring platform polls it or receives notifications. That is a useful role. It does not make SNMP a rich AV control API.
Scope: SNMP — select the deployed product/version; optional services require separate selection.
protocol · Catalog reviewed 2026-10-21
Infrastructure Requirements
- IP reachability between manager and agent
- UDP 161 for polling/queries and usually UDP 162 for notifications
- vendor MIB files if you want anything better than generic system counters
- an NMS/MIB browser that can actually load the vendor's enterprise MIB modules
- ACL/firewall policy that explicitly permits only the monitoring hosts that should be talking to the device
- deliberately bounded polling / table-walk behavior so GetBulk or broad GetNext walks do not overrun weak embedded agents
- SNMPv3 user/security configuration if the deployment is not intentionally isolated
- correct authoritative-engine / snmpEngineID handling for SNMPv3 because user keys are localized per engine rather than being one universal shared secret across every endpoint
- and explicit transport-mode evidence if a project proposes less-common SNMP over SSH, TLS, or DTLS rather than the normal UDP mapping
Network & Physical Requirements
| Port / allocation | Transport | Connection / signal flow | Feature and requirement | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 161 | UDP | Management station → SNMP agent | Profile requirement · Core SNMP polling SNMP over UDP | Source checked 2026-09-27 RFC 3417, Section 3.2: Well-known Values |
| 162 | UDP | SNMP agent → Notification receiver | Optional · Notifications SNMP traps and informs SNMP notifications | Source checked 2026-09-27 RFC 3417, Section 3.2: Well-known Values |
| 10161 | TCP | Manager → Agent | Optional · TLS mapping SNMP over TLS SNMP TLS transport mapping | Source checked 2026-09-27 RFC 6353, Section 10: IANA Considerations (SNMP-TLS and notification ports) |
| 10162 | TCP | Agent → Manager | Optional · TLS notifications SNMP notifications over TLS SNMP TLS notification mapping | Source checked 2026-09-27 RFC 6353, Section 10: IANA Considerations (SNMP-TLS and notification ports) |
Gotchas & IT Notes
- ⚠SNMPv3 authentication/privacy does not imply TLS or DTLS. Use the selected security model, access control and supported transport.
- ⚠Optional DTLS uses UDP with its specified secure mapping; do not open TLS/DTLS paths for ordinary UDP SNMP.