30.1 Benefits of SNMP Support

The primary benefits of SNMP support include the following:

• The monitoring of key Oracle products is quickly integrated into any management framework based upon SNMP.

• These Oracle products are located, identified, and monitored in real time across enterprise networks of any size.

• Administrators see standard Oracle icons that represent Oracle products in a network map. You can dynamically customize this map.

• Administrators see the current status of Oracle products, as shown by several status variables that are defined for each product in a management information base (MIB), or they can select which elements to view by their status.

• Administrators can anticipate exceptional conditions by defining thresholds and alerts, to respond to special situations as soon as they occur or to enable automatic responses.

• Administrators can store and analyze historical data that has been obtained through SNMP.

• Providers of management applications can easily build customized solutions for Oracle customers because SNMP is an open standard.

Strictly speaking, SNMP support is intended more for monitoring Oracle products than for managing them. SNMP support is invaluable for tracking the status of an entire network of Oracle applications — first, to verify normal operations, and second, to spot and react to potential problems as soon as they are detected. However, for purposes of investigating and solving some problems, other Oracle tools such as Oracle SQL *Plus Worksheet may be more appropriate. This is because SNMP support is designed to query status, but not to change system parameters, whereas other tools are designed to set or tune system parameters.