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Glossary of Terms

A | B | C | J | M | O | S
A
Agent
A system on the network that conforms to SNMP and maintains a set of variables defined by SNMP that reflect the conditions on the network. An agent can control access to its variables by a manager.
API
Application Programming Interface
Application (or Applet)
A software product that uses (includes) the SNMP component
B
Bean
A bean is a JavaBeans component. It is an independent, reusable software module. Beans may be visible objects, like AWT components, or invisible objects, like queues and stacks. A builder/integration tool manipulates beans to create applets and applications.

Note : This however is not strictly true for the SNMP Manager bean which can work only as an application due to security restrictions that apply to applets.

C
Community
A grouping of Agents and Managers to define domains for convenience of management.
Component
A piece of software isolated into a discrete, easily reusable structure.
J
Java
An object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems. Java programs are compiled into class files that can run on any computer platform that has a Java Virtual Machine.
JavaBeans
A portable, platform-independent component model, based on Java. The model allows creation of small, reusable, software components. A visual builder program combines components from different sources to create applications quickly and easily.
M
Manager
A system on the network that conforms to SNMP and is responsible for monitoring / controlling the network through get / set operations on variables maintained at agents.
MIB (Management Information Base)
A set of variables that a host running SNMP maintains. Managers can fetch or store into these variables. MIB-2 refers to an extended management database of variables.
O
Object A network resource managed by the Manager. It is mapped to one of the variables maintained by the Agent and is represented by a unique Object Identifier.
Object Identifier A unique name (identifier) for an Object. The Object Identifier namespace is managed by ISO & CCITT to ensure globally unique identifiers for objects.
S
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
A standard protocol to monitor hosts, and networks to which they attach. It defines a set of variables that a host (the Agent) must keep and specifies that all operations on the host are a side effect of fetching or storing to the variables.