GPFS SNMP support

GPFS™ supports the use of the SNMP protocol for monitoring the status and configuration of the GPFS cluster. Using an SNMP application, the system administrator can get a detailed view of the system and be instantly notified of important events, such as a node or disk failure.

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an application-layer protocol that facilitates the exchange of management information between network devices. It is part of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocol suite. SNMP enables network administrators to manage network performance, find and solve network problems, and plan for network growth.

SNMP consists of commands to enumerate, read, and write managed variables that are defined for a particular device. It also has a trap command, for communicating events asynchronously.

The variables are organized as instances of objects, known as management information bases (MIBs). MIBs are organized in a hierarchical tree by organization (for example, IBM®). A GPFS MIB is defined for monitoring many aspects of GPFS.

An SNMP agent software architecture typically consists of a master agent and a set of subagents, which communicate with the master agent through a specific agent/subagent protocol (the AgentX protocol in this case). Each subagent handles a particular system or type of device. A GPFS SNMP subagent is provided, which maps the SNMP objects and their values.