Concepts and Terms to Understand

SNMP operations - HP Insight Management Agents are based on the SNMP protocol, which includes the GET, SET, and TRAP operations defined as follows:

In conjunction with the HP Insight Management Agents, HP SIM automate SNMP operations in an intuitive interface that does not require you have a detailed understanding of SNMP.

Although you can use HP manageability tools and HP Insight Management Agents without detailed comprehension of SNMP, you find the background information listed helpful in understanding the operations performed by your HP manageability software, particularly in regard to the relevance of community strings. For detailed information about SNMP, see the Net-SNMP Web site:

http://www.net-snmp.net

Community string - During agent configuration, you are prompted to set values for community strings, which function somewhat like passwords. A community string must be known to both the system running the HP Insight Management Agents and the system serving as the CMS to grant access. A read-only community string allows the user who knows its value to retrieve SNMP data. A read/write community string allows the user who knows its value to both retrieve and modify SNMP data.

	IMPORTANT: Do not use the same community string for read-only access as you do for read/write access or you might disable read/write access.

Trap destination - A trap destination is a machine to which you want a server’s status indicators sent for further analysis. For example, the HP SIM CMS could be the trap destination for a server installed with HP Insight Management Agents. You are prompted to specify a trap destination during agent configuration. Each trap destination has a corresponding trap community string.