Introduction and Roadmap

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) enables enterprise-wide management systems to manage heterogeneous software and hardware environments from a single management console.

The following sections describe the contents and organization of this guide—WebLogic SNMP Management Guide.

Document Scope and Audience

This document is a resource for systems administrators who use SNMP to monitor WebLogic Server.

The topics in this document describe the SNMP capabilities of WebLogic Server. The Administration Console Online Help provides specific, task-related information on configuring SNMP services in a WebLogic Server domain.

It is assumed that the reader is familiar with SNMP and general network management concepts. For background information on SNMP, refer to the documents listed in Related Documentation.

Guide to this Document

This chapter, Introduction and Roadmap, describes the audience of the guide and provides pointers to related documentation.
Understanding the WebLogic Sever SNMP Agents and MIB, describes basic concepts of Simple Network Management Protocol as they apply to managing WebLogic Servers.
Understanding WebLogic Server Notifications, describes the characteristics of WebLogic enterprise-specific SNMP notifications.
Understanding SNMP Proxies, describes how WebLogic Server can function as a master agent that proxies for other SNMP agents.
WebLogic SNMP Command-Line Utility, describes a command-line utility that offers many of the same features as an SNMP manager.

Related Documentation

For step-by-step instructions on configuring SNMP services in a WebLogic Server domain, see “ Use SNMP to Monitor WebLogic Server” in the Administration Console Online Help.

For information on other technologies for monitoring WebLogic Server, see the following documents:

Standards Supported by WebLogic Server SNMP

Table 1-1 Supported SNMP Standards
Feature	Supported Standard
SNMP protocol	SNMPv1, SNMPv2, SNMPv3
Network protocol	UDP, TCP
Authentication protocol for SNMPv3	HMAC-MD5-96, HMAC-SHA-96
Privacy protocol for SNMPv3	Cipher block chaining or CBC mode of the Data Encryption Standard The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Cipher Algorithm.See RFC 3826 at http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=3826

New and Changed SNMP Features in This Release

Release 10.0 introduces several important changes to WebLogic Server SNMP services:

WebLogic Server now supports the SNMPv3 protocol in addition to the SNMPv1 and SNMPv2 protocols.

In the SNMPv3 protocol, both SNMP agent and manager must encode identical credentials in their PDUs for the communication to succeed. For additional security and flexibility, WebLogic Server SNMP agents map SNMP credentials to a WebLogic Server user. The WebLogic Server security realm authenticates the user and authorizes access to monitoring data in the domain.

You can now create multiple SNMP agents in a domain and target the agents to WebLogic Server instances. See Organizing SNMP Agents in a Domain.
WebLogic Server SNMP agents now communicate through a TCP port in addition to a UDP port. See Configuring UDP and TCP Ports.
You can now use SNMP to monitor MBeans that you create and register (custom MBeans). See Monitoring Custom MBeans.
The SNMP command-line utility that is documented in the WebLogic SNMP Agent Command-Line Reference chapter of WebLogic Server Command Reference is deprecated as of WebLogic Server 10.0. Instead, use the SNMP command-line utility that is documented in WebLogic SNMP Command-Line Utility.
You can now change configuration options for SNMP agents—including port numbers—without needing to restart WebLogic Server. Before this release, most changes required a restart.