STA and SNMP

Communication between STA and the libraries is done through the SNMP interface. In SNMP terms, STA is a client agent and each library is a server agent.

SNMP v3 is the recommended protocol for SNMP communications between STA and the monitored libraries. The authentication, encryption, and message integrity features in SNMP v3 provide a secure mechanism for sending library data. You can, however, optionally choose to use SNMP v2c for one or more libraries. In addition, depending on library firmware level, some libraries may require an SNMP v2c user name for establishing the initial communication handshake with STA, even though they use SNMP v3 for traps and get functions. See “Configuring the Libraries for STA” in the STA Configuration Guide for details.

To set up SNMP connections between the STA server and the libraries, you must configure an SNMP user and an SNMP trap recipient on both STA and each monitored library. The values of each must match, which means all libraries must use the same SNMP user and trap recipient for STA.

Caution – Oracle’s Service Delivery Platform (SDP) also uses SNMP. When defining SNMP user names for STA, be careful not to make changes to the library SNMP configuration that would conflict with SDP’s requirements. Please see your Oracle support representative for assistance.

Configuring STA Connections With the Libraries

To configure the connections, you must perform some procedures on the libraries and some on the STA server. For complete instructions, see the following chapters in the STA Configuration Guide:

UDP Considerations

SNMP uses the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) network protocol. UDP is connectionless, which presents certain advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is low overhead on the network interface. One disadvantage is that messages can arrive out of order or be lost — when an agent sends an SNMP trap, it receives no acknowledgment from the client that the trap has been received.

Because STA is an analytics application that provides statistical assessments based on trends over time, occasional lost traps do not affect the overall quality of the data. However, there are some concepts and best practices that an STA user or administrator can use to avoid excessive amounts of lost or unavailable data. These are described in this section.